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“... the vogue, with magisterial strength and gloomy inclusiveness. Said, deferential but still his own man, characteristically points out that to treat modern music as a reflection or portent of the world’s present or impending ruin is actually a Eurocentric view, taken, with unconscious colonialist arrogance, to apply universally. He knows far too much about ...”

“... of thinker we’re talking about. When it was discovered a few years after his death in 1983 that Paul deMan had written for Nazi-controlled newspapers in Belgium, a debate began on whether this had any bearing on the deconstruction he propounded. The new revelations rooted out by Evelyn Barish in her biography of ...”

“... significance and a new promise. In that book, he openly mourns Roland Barthes, who died in 1980, Paul deMan, who died in 1983, Michel Foucault, who died in 1984, and a host of others, including Edmund Jabès (1991), Louis Marin (1992), Sarah Kofman (1994), Emmanuel Levinas (1995) and Jean-François Lyotard (1998). In ...”

“... from Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale, where Frédéric Moreau, standing on the pont de la Concorde in Paris, very briefly contemplates suicide and even more swiftly decides against it. I’ve slightly modified the translation by Douglas Parmée. Des nues sombres couraient sur la face de la lune. Il la ...”

“... in his sights, of the human animal first coming across itself and deciding on a name: A primitive man, on meeting other men, will first have experienced fright. His fear will make him see these men as larger and stronger than himself; he will give them the name giants. After many experiences, he will discover that the supposed giants are neither larger nor ...”

“... for them, or getting them to confess, and Wolfson evokes an interesting ambiguity in a remark by Paul deMan and its citation by Marjorie Garber. De Man writes of ‘making the death speak’, which in Garber’s quotation becomes ‘making the dead speak’. As Wolfson ...”

“... was short-lived in France, and I have heard Derrida described as a vedette américaine. Paul deMan seems to be largely unknown in French intellectual life. For all his knowingness to the effect that the real world is a bigger place than the academy and one to whose pressures the academy, including the ...”

“... with seven companion volumes comprising just about every notable document by or about the great man: altogether a revolution in knowledge, and one that has knocked on the head many a misconception. No longer can it be said, for instance, that Churchill forced the Asquith Cabinet into Gallipoli or the Baldwin Cabinet into the General Strike. Gilbert has been ...”

“... of battling with the Estate seems to have altered Rose’s work, much as the discovery of Paul deMan’s wartime journalism forced Deconstructionists to deal with history. As she writes, ‘it can be argued (it has recently been argued in relation to the critic ...”

“... to end up feeling that she has a point. The critical approach she has in mind is a form of what Paul Ricoeur calls the hermeneutics of suspicion. On this view, the task of critique is to dig out hidden meanings and concealed contradictions in a text, scanning it for those symptomatic points at which it falters, deadlocks, disrupts its own logic or threatens ...”

“... the false, material and murderous revolution ushered in by 1789. Harold Bloom, Hillis Miller and Paul deMan see something profoundly representative in Wordsworth’s sudden retreat from the public to the private sphere – the threshold of modernity, the moment when the political and social goals of history become ...”

“... comment on the strange works of this artist. He adds that Piero lived more like a brute than a man, subsisted on boiled eggs, cooked 50 at a time while he was boiling his glue, studied a wall on which sick persons had used to spit, imagining that he saw there fantastic cities and combats of horses. Moreover he would never suffer his fruit trees to be ...”

“... Chandler took these musings. On top of being a relapse-prone white-knuckle drunk, he was a lonely man who preferred the mail to company and took pains to make his letters entertainingly cantankerous. Still, it’s clear that he had trouble reconciling the clean-limbed notions of ‘romance’ he’d absorbed in his youth in London – where, before the First ...”

“... to the writings of Derrida, and relies on his interpretation of the ‘hard’ deconstruction of Paul deMan. This reliance makes for very heavy going. His discussion of de Man is full of technical terms and ill-defined concepts, which are notably absent from the rest of this ...”

“... egotism, and he saw it in Wordsworth, a poet superbly ensconced in ‘the dread watch-tower of man’s absolute self’. As Frank Kermode argued in Romantic Image (1957), it is really not so large a step from the solitary tower of the Wordsworthian ego to the lonely tower of high aestheticism; and while it would never have crossed Coleridge’s mind to say ...”