Legacies of Paul De Man

Marc Redfield is Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Brown University. His most recent books are The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror (Fordham, 2009); and Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America (Fordham, 2016).

A remarkable collection of essays brimming with forceful arguments and telling interventions. The volume is itself an example of the complexity and critical power of the legacy that it so thoughtfully explores, at once caught in the wake of de Man's thought and critically traversing that wake in ways that make its enduring features legible, important, and endlessly productive.---—David L. Clark, McMaster University This is a wonderfully diverse and authoritative collection of essays on the legacies of de Man's writings and pedagogical force. The collection shows how vital and indispensable, for serious work in literary study and literary theory, attempting to come to terms with de Man's work still is. In order to come to terms with that work, one must read it, slowly and carefully, as these critics conspicuously have done. The essays also show, following de Man, how difficult and problematic reading is.---—J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine The specter of Paul de Man continues to haunt literary studies as the name for 'theory' in the humanities at large. This collection of essays, by distinguished scholars deeply engaged with de Man's work, reminds us that it is time, once again, to rethink the critical legacy of Paul de Man; premier theorist of romanticism, poetics, textual materialism, temporality, theoretical resistance, aesthetic ideology, truth as tropology, reading as pedagogy, and literary technics. An essential book for the teaching of literary criticism and theory, a provocative foray into future deconstructions.---—Emily Apter, New York University