Legacies of Paul de Man

Description

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 The first appendix lists the courses taught by de Man at Yale; the second makes available a previously unpublished document, almost certainly authored by de Man: a course proposal for the undergraduate course "Literature Z" that de Man and Geoffrey Hartman began teaching at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. Title Page Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Legacies of Paul de Man / Marc Redfield Part I: Reading Double-Take: Reading de Man and Derrida Writing on Tropes / Cynthia Chase Reading, Begging, Paul de Man / Jan Mieszkowski Part II: Reading History History against Historicism, Formal Matters, and the Event of the Text: de Man with Benjamin / Ian Balfour Discontinuous Shifts: History Reading History / Andrzej Warminski Part III: Institutions of Pedagogy ‘‘At the Far End of This Ongoing Enterprise...'’ / Sara Guyer Professing Literature: John Guillory’s Misreading of Paul de Man / Marc Redfield Part IV: Theory, Materiality, and the Aesthetic Thinking Singularity with Immanuel Kant and Paul de Man: Aesthetics, Epistemology, History, and Politics / Arkady Plotnitsky Seeing Is Reading / Rei Terada Appendix 1: Courses Taught by Paul de Man during the Yale Era / Marc Redfield Appendix 2: Paul de Man, ‘‘Course Proposal: Literature Z’’ Contributors Notes Index