Paul de Man was a Belgian-born literary critic and theorist of deconstruction. His work focused on challenging traditional interpretations and revealing the inherent contradictions within literary texts. De Man's influence on literary theory is significant, though his legacy has been complicated by revelations about his wartime activities. He was a central figure of the so-called Yale School of deconstruction and shaped the work of many subsequent scholars.
An anthology that collects texts and papers from the Paul de Man archive, including essays on art, translations, critical fragments, research plans, interviews, and reports on the state of comparative literature. It also engages with Paul de Man's institutional life.
A culmination of de Man's thoughts on philosophy, politics and history. The book presents an inquiry into the relation of rhetoric, epistemology and aesthetics, that offers radical notions of materiality. These texts were written or delivered as lectures during the last years of Man's life.
This volume assembles for the first time material written by Paul de Man between 1954 and 1981, including his previously unpublished Gauss Seminar lectures delivered at Princeton in 1967, three papers on romantic and postromantic issues, a commissioned essay on Roland Barthes, and two substantial responses to papers by Frank Kermode and Murray Krieger. Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism represents de Man's reflections on some of the major texts of English, German, and French Romanticism and their reception in twentieth-century literary criticism and theory. The Gauss Seminar lectures in particular convey de Man's consideration of Romanticism as a distinct form of historical consciousness, and illuminate his conviction that this romantic historical consciousness had been a powerful influence on our own development of a historical identity. De Man had planned to use the Gauss lectures as a basis for a major historical study of Romanticism, but the volume was never completed and de Man eventually abandoned the project. Drawn from four decades of de Man's career, these essays reflect the transition in the critic's work from the thematics and vocabulary of "consciousness" and "temporality" characteristic of his work in the 1960s, to the language-oriented concerns and terminology of his later writings.
First published in 1983. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Through eleavorate & elegant close readings of poems by Rilke, Proust, Nietzsches and the major works of Rousseau, de Man concludes that all writing concerns itself with its own activity as language, & language, he says, is always unreliable, slippery, impossible...Literary narrative, because it must rely on language, tells the story of its own inability to tell a story.... De Man demonstrates, beautifully & convincingly, that language turns back on itself, that rhetoric is untrustworthy. -- Amazon.com