Allegories of reading

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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