Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism - Paperback

by Paul de Man (Author)

In Blindness and Insight, de Man examines several critics and finds in their writings a gap between their statements about the nature of literature and the results of their practical criticism. Not only are the critics unaware of this gap, says de Man, but their blindness to it often leads to some of their most valuable insights. The central issue of de Man's work is the rhetorical constitution of the text, and this book, with its new introduction by Wlad Godzich and five additional essays by de Man, is meant to challenge readers to a new appreciation of their chosen task as readers of literature. Included in this new edition are the original essays on Binswanger, Poulet, Lukas, Blanchot, the New Critics, and Derrida's of Grammatology', as well as five more: The Rhetoric of Temporality', The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism', Heidegger's Exegesis of Holderlin', a review of Bloom's Anxiety of Influence, and Literature and Language'.

Author Biography

Paul de Man is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, where he has taught comparative literature since 1970. He has taught at Harvard, Cornell, and Johns Hopkins, and has held a chair in comparative literature at the University of Zürich. De Man is the author of Allegories of Reading: Figurai Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust.,
Wlad Godzich is associate professor and director of the comparative literature program at the University of Minnesota. He is co-editor, with Jochen Schulte-Sasse, of the series Theory and History of Literature.