Legacies of Paul de Man - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 082322760X ISBN 13: 9780823227600

Publisher: Fordham University Press, 2007

Synopsis

More than twenty years after his death, Paul de Man remains a haunting presence in the American academy. His name is linked not just with "deconstruction," but with a "deconstruction in America" that continues to disturb the scholarly and pedagogical institution it inhabits. The academy seems driven to characterize "de Manian deconstruction," again and again, as dead. Such reiterated acts of exorcism testify that de Man's ghost has in fact never been laid to rest, and for good reason: a dispassionate survey of recent trends in critical theory and practice reveals that de Man's influence is considerable and ongoing. His name still commands an aura of excitement, even danger: it stands for the pressure of a text and a "theory" that resists easy assimilation or containment.

The essays in this volume analyze and evaluate aspects of de Man's strange, powerful legacy. The opening contributions focus on his great theme of "reading"; subsequent chapters explore his complex notions of "history," "materiality," and "aesthetic ideology," and examine his institutional role as a teacher and, more generally, as a charismatic figure associated with the fortunes of "theory."

Because the notion of legacy immediately raises questions about the institutional transmission of thought, the collection concludes with two appendixes offering documentary aids to scholars interested in de Man as an institutional presence and pedagogue. The first appendix lists the courses taught by de Man at Yale; the second makes available a previously unpublished document, almost certainly authored by de Man: a course proposal for the undergraduate course "Literature Z" that de Man and Geoffrey Hartman began teaching at Yale in the spring of 1977.

About this title

About the Author

Marc Redfield is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and chair of Comparative Literature at Brown University. His books include Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman; The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism; and The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror (Fordham).

Review

This is a wonderfully diverse and authoritative collection of essays on the legacies of de Man's writings and pedagogical force. The collection shows how vital and indispensable, for serious work in literary study and literary theory, attempting to come to terms with de Man's work still is. In order to come to terms with that work, one must read it, slowly and carefully, as these critics conspicuously have done. The essays also show, following de Man, how difficult and problematic reading is. (―J. Hillis Miller University of California, Irvine)

A remarkable collection of essays brimming with forceful arguments and telling interventions. The volume is itself an example of the complexity and critical power of the legacy that it so thoughtfully explores, at once caught in the wake of de Man’s thought and critically traversing that wake in ways that make its enduring features legible, important, and endlessly productive. (―David L. Clark McMaster University)

The specter of Paul de Man continues to haunt literary studies as the name for 'theory' in the humanities at large. This collection of essays, by distinguished scholars deeply engaged with de Man's work, reminds us that it is time, once again, to rethink the critical legacy of Paul de Man; premier theorist of romanticism, poetics, textual materialism, temporality, theoretical resistance, aesthetic ideology, truth as tropology, reading as pedagogy, and literary technics. An essential book for the teaching of literary criticism and theory, a provocative foray into future deconstructions. (―Emily Apter New York University)

About this edition

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 082322760X
• ISBN 13: 9780823227600
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 236
• Editor: Redfield Marc