![]() ![]() ![]() De Man argues forcefully that the recurring motive of theoretical readings is to subsume these decisions under theoretical futile generalizations, which are displaced in turn into harsh polemics about theory. Taking up the example of the title Keats' poem The Fall of Hyperion, de Man draws out an irreducible interpretive undecidability which bears strong affinities to the same term in Derrida's work and some similarity to the notion of incommensurability as developed by Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition and The Differend. Using the example of the classical trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, de Man argued that the use of linguistic sciences in literary theory and criticism was able to harmonize the logical and grammatical dimension of literature but at the expense of effacing the rhetorical elements of texts which presented the greatest interpretive demands. The essay "The Resistance to Theory," which explores the task and philosophical bases of literary theory, was commissioned and then refused by the Modern Language Association for an introductory volume on theory, on the grounds that it found the pedagogical task of delimiting the field of literary criticism "impossible". Derrida and de Man met in 1966 at a Johns Hopkins conference on structuralism at a time both were immersed in studies of Rousseau.ĭe Man is known for subtle readings of British and German romantic and post-romantic poetry and philosophy ( The Rhetoric of Romanticism) and concise and deeply ironic essays of a quasi-programmatic theoretical orientation. He was a close friend of Jacques Derrida and elaborated a distinct deconstruction in his philosophically-oriented literary criticism of John Keats, Maurice Blanchot, Marcel Proust, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant, GWF Hegel, Walter Benjamin, German Romanticism, and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others. at Harvard in the late 1950s, taught at Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Zurich, before ending up at Yale, where he was considered part of the Yale School of deconstruction and a member of the faculty in French and Comparative Literature. He was born in Belgium and after completing his Ph.D. At the time of his death from cancer he was Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. ![]()
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