Paul De Man Notebooks

This anthology collects texts and papers from the Paul de Man archive, including essays on art, translations, critical fragments, research plans, interviews, and reports on the state of comparative literature. These texts offer a fascinating insight into the work of one of the twentieth century's most important literary theorists. The volume engages with Paul de Man's institutional life, gathering together pedagogical and critical material to investigate his profound influence on the American academy and theory today. It also contains a number of substantial, previously unpublished and untranslated texts by de Man from the span of his writing career. As a new collection of primary sources this volume further stimulates the growing reappraisal of de Man's work.

This anthology collects 36 texts and papers from the Paul de Man archive, including essays on art and literature, translations, critical fragments, research plans, interviews and reports on the state of comparative literature. Divided into 4 sections - Texts, Translations, Teaching and Research - these materials offer a fascinating insight into the work of one of the 20th century's most important literary theorists. The volume also engages with Paul de Man's institutional life, gathering together pedagogical and critical material to investigate his profound influence on the American academy and theory today. It contains a number of substantial, previously unpublished and un-translated texts by de Man from the span of his writing career. Accompanied by the Editor's insightful introduction and an extensive bibliography, this new collection of primary sources further enables the growing reappraisal of de Man's work.

Describes the life of the Yale University professor behind the deconstruction movement, who at the time of his death was one of the most influential literary critics in America but was later revealed to be a Nazi collaborator and anti-Semite.

The basic story of the rise, reign, and fall of deconstruction as a literary and philosophical groundswell is well known among scholars. In this intellectual history, Gregory Jones-Katz aims to transform the broader understanding of a movement that has been frequently misunderstood, mischaracterized, and left for dead—even as its principles and influence transformed literary studies and a host of other fields in the humanities. ? Deconstruction begins well before Jacques Derrida’s initial American presentation of his deconstructive work in a famed lecture at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 and continues through several decades of theoretic growth and tumult. While much of the subsequent story remains focused, inevitably, on Yale University and the personalities and curriculum that came to be lumped under the “Yale school” umbrella, Deconstruction makes clear how crucial feminism, queer theory, and gender studies also were to the lifeblood of this mode of thought. Ultimately, Jones-Katz shows that deconstruction in the United States—so often caricatured as a French infection—was truly an American phenomenon, rooted in our preexisting political and intellectual tensions, that eventually came to influence unexpected corners of scholarship, politics, and culture.

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

Re-reads a major theorist in terms of the current crisis in sovereignty and global capital. Taking de Man's recently published manuscript Textual Allegories as a point of departure, 13 experts, themselves significant voices in contemporary literary theory, revisit de Man's account of Rousseau and what he calls a 'Theotropic Allegory' (the second to last step before 'Political Allegory', on the road toward a general theory of Textual Allegory). They frame de Man's readings of Rousseau in a 'post-theoretical' landscape concerned with political theology, occupied with the transformation of the western model of sovereignty, and faced with the apparent collapse of the capitalist global contract. The volume is framed by an introduction by leading de Man scholar, Martin McQuillan, and concludes with an original and previously unpublished text by Paul de Man.

New essays providing an up-to-date picture of the engagement of artists, philosophers, and critics with Kafka's work.

Aesthetic Thinking: Essays on Intention, Painting, Action, and Ideology anthologises some of Fred Orton’s important contributions to rethinking the social history of art and art practice. More than that, it offers a vivid demonstration of how theory can generate new interpretations and unsettle old ones.