Paul de Man

-- Cynthia Chase, author of Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition

"This is an outstanding work of scholarship and criticism. It is the most scrupulous and intelligent study of Paul de Man's writings."--Jonathan Culler, author of On Deconstruction (1982). "The debates about deconstruction may now be waning, but the historical and cultural analysis of the phenomenon is just beginning. De Graef's book will be the beginning of a serious study of this movement as an intellectual force."--Sander Gilman, author of Inscribing the Other (Nebraska, 1991).A polymath well versed in European literature and philosophy, one of the founders of deconstruction, and a widely respected teacher, Paul de Man brought unprecedented attention and acclaim to the so-called Yale Critics. His fame was at a zenith when he died suddenly in 1983. A few years later, Ortwin de Graef found the de Man had written for the collaborationist press during the Nazi occupation, a discovery that ignited an international reassessment of de Man's work.Serenity in Crisis is the first sustained account of the complex, intertextual tradition in which de Man wrote and of the persistent concerns expressed in his early work. It reconstructs the truth-models with which de Man justified his political choice before and during the occupation and traces them back to an ambitious intention to integrate the competing truths of the natural sciences, the social sciences, and literature. The significance of de Man's ideational framework and the decisions that followed from it have extended well beyond the disasters of World War II. De Graef clearly illuminates and critiques the abstruse paths of logic in de Man's early writings as well as in the reformulations of de Man's thought expressed in his writings of the 1950s.Ortwin de Graef holds a doctorate in letters and philosophy from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and is a researcher with the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research. He is the author of several articles and essays on Paul de Man, including one in Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism (1989), also published by the University of Nebraska Press.

". . . A valuable anthology of essays that reflect the wide spectrum of critical opinion in American studies today. . . . [It] provides a good survey of contemporary criticism and helps to clarify the relationship of various movements to each other and to literary theory."—SOUTH ATLANTIC REVIEW

'in our era, criticism is not merely a library of secondary aids to the understanding and appreciation of literary texts, but also a rapidly expanding body of knowledge in its own right' David Lodge This new edition of David Lodge's Modern Criticism and Theoryis fully revised and expanded to take account of the developments in theoretical contemporary literary criticism since the publication of the first edition in 1988. Building on the strengths of the first edition, this volume is designed to introduce the reader to the guiding concepts of present literary and cultural debate by presenting substantial extracts from the most seminal thinkers. As with the original edition there is a selection of the most important and representative work from the major schools in contemporary criticism. Concise introductions with updated suggestions for further reading give a context for each essay and the editors have provided footnotes that help explain the most difficult references. Both students and general readers are encouraged to identify for themselves links between essays, as the selection is ordered both historically and thematically.

Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, French Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. Kaplan begins with a distinctly American quest for an imaginary France of the intelligence. But soon her infatuation with all things French comes up against the dark, unimagined recesses of French political and cultural life. The daughter of a Jewish lawyer who prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, Kaplan grew up in the 1960s in the Midwest. After her father's death when she was seven, French became her way of "leaving home" and finding herself in another language and culture. In spare, midwestern prose, by turns intimate and wry, Kaplan describes how, as a student in a Swiss boarding school and later in a junior year abroad in Bordeaux, she passionately sought the French "r," attentively honed her accent, and learned the idioms of her French lover. When, as a graduate student, her passion for French culture turned to the elegance and sophistication of its intellectual life, she found herself drawn to the language and style of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At the same time she was repulsed by his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s, during the heyday of deconstruction she chose to transgress its apolitical purity and work on a subject "that made history impossible to ignore:" French fascist intellectuals. Kaplan's discussion of the "de Man affair" — the discovery that her brilliant and charismatic Yale professor had written compromising articles for the pro-Nazi Belgian press—and her personal account of the paradoxes of deconstruction are among the most compelling available on this subject. French Lessons belongs in the company of Sartre's Words and the memoirs of Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Eva Hoffman. No book so engrossingly conveys both the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of the intellectual life.

Morrison examines the legacy of the modernist poetics of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, as it relates to current theoretical orthodoxies, and traces its influence on the current crisis in post-structural literary theory. Morrison reads the politics of post-structural theory in relation to the socio-cultural arguments espoused in the poetry and prose by Pound and Eliot, and reveals a continuity between that theory and high modernism's tendency towards fascism. Without reducing the political implications of poetry to mere caricature and without slighting the force and fact of literary mediation, Morrison has produced a book that will reshape the discussion of the social dimension of modernism. He concludes with a provocative analysis of deconstruction and the work of Paul de Man, and makes a case for a new post-structural theory that can accommodate history.

Much work has been done on rhetoric and rhetorical theory in the 20th century, with scientists discussing the rhetoric of the scientific method and philosophers debating the rhetoric of the metaphysical tradition. This reference summarizes major trends in rhetoric during the last hundred years. Included are alphabetically arranged entries on 40 20th- century rhetoricians, such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Edward P. J. Corbett, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Walter J. Ong, and I. A. Richards. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and provides a brief biography, an analysis of the figure's rhetorical theory, and a bibliography of primary and secondary works. The volume concludes with extensive bibliographical material.