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“... here that would gladden the heart of a rearguard New Critic, but little – besides the somewhat de rigueur terminology – that a current post-structuralist would want to take on board. By an odd quirk of circumstance, Columbia have also brought out a translation of Philippe Sollers’s Writing and the Experience of Limits, a collection of essays first ...”

“... In 1987, readers of the New York Times were further baffled to learn that during the war Paul deMan, a leading exponent of Deconstruction, had written almost two hundred all-too-comprehensible articles for a Nazi newspaper, at least one of which was grossly anti-semitic. Public alarm on the subject was ...”

“... two kinds of critical style, that of the learned specialist and that of the public critic (a.k.a. man of letters)’. He himself, for instance, is a learned specialist, a pro, whereas the likes of George Steiner and myself are ‘public critics’ (a.k.a. reviewers, vulgarisateurs), given to needless complaints about the ‘dehumanising’ technical language ...”

“... There is good evidence to support his scepticism at his home institution in the so-called École de Yale. In 1979, Harold Bloom, Paul deMan, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller, all at the time Yale colleagues, put together a kind of manifesto entitled ...”

“... Artaud, you become dependent on the past if only because you need to have it around to reject. As Paul deMan observed in his subtle essay ‘Literary History and Literary Modernity’, ‘the more radical the rejection of anything that came before, the greater the dependence on the past.’* What blurs these ...”

“... who believe that sinister things are happening in the Pen Settlement for offenders on the Isle of Man. They are also disturbed by the voluntary group suicides called the Quietus, organised by the Special Security Police and approved by the Council. Faron agrees to approach the Warden, although he is sceptical of the complaints. He defines ‘sound ...”

“... of textual interpretation. Particularly irksome is the claim of conceptual rhetoricians like Paul deMan that philosophy has not yet caught up with ‘elementary refinements’ that criticism has long since taken for granted. Deconstruction goes furthest towards contesting the status of philosophy by showing how ...”

“... book describes their affair, or rather the collision of their personalities, the clash between a man who insists there is no such thing as the self and a woman whose psychological disorder requires her to interpret everything in the world as relating to her. Of course, it’s Vander who proves the real egotist. ‘Were we,’ Vander asks, any of ...”

“... trajectory, about intense preoccupations and about meetings with remarkable men (Harold Bloom, Paul deMan, Lacan etc), not about wives and children or, indeed, meetings with remarkable women. It is, unusually, a memoir without alibis, without a palpable design on the reader. As a critic Hartman never takes ...”

“... a scholarly cause célèbre. One has only to compare the recent furore over Martin Heidegger and Paul deMan to see how slight the impact of the Blunt affair has been on the academic community. Mutatis mutandis, all three men had disreputable if not dishonourable commerce with totalitarian regimes, all three produced ...”

“... play of intrigue that has thwarted me all my life’ but some self-indulgence is inevitable: as Paul deMan, speaking of Jean-Jacques, neatly notes, qui s’accuse s’excuse. Hence a detailed accounting of many amorous episodes in many parts of the world, all spiced, though not fiercely, by cradle-Catholic ...”

“... he bestowed on them) before he buries himself in the rustic retreat of Montmorency. He is still a man subject to the strongest of emotions, capable of moving easily from melancholy to indignation, from humility to pride and petulance, from friendship to jealousy and enmity. He could declare his love for the whole of the human race and then practise the ...”

“... novel, which might be called the old nouveau roman in its latest or ‘deconstructionist’ phase: Paul deMan says deconstruction is about ‘the fallacy of reference in a necessarily referential mode’. Names of characters, for instance, aren’t much use as points of reference without at least a face or a label of ...”

“... to make reader-reception – or the most effective propaganda? – our arbiter of war. Shades of Paul deMan, perhaps.It would, for instance, be both a pity and a lie if another Irish anthology. Troubled Times: ‘Fortnight’ Magazine and the Troubles in Northern Ireland I970-91,† had left out ‘what really ...”

“... 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 ...”