Material Inscriptions

Andrzej Warminski is Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He has published Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory with Edinburgh University Press (2013). He is also the author of Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger and the editor of Paul de Man’s Aesthetic Ideology.

• Acknowledgements; Preface; 1. Facing Language: Wordsworth’s First Poetic Spirits (‘Blest Babe,’ ‘Drowned Man,’ ‘Blind Beggar’); 2. Aesthetic Ideology and Material Inscription: On Hegel’s Aesthetics and Keats’s Urn; 3. Spectre Shapes: ‘The Body of Descartes?’; 4. Reading for Example: A Metaphor in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy; 5. Towards a Fabulous Reading: Nietzsche’s ‘On Truth and Lie in the Extra-moral Sense’; 6. Reading Over Endless Histories: Henry James’s ‘The Altar of the Dead’; 7. Ending Up / Taking Back (with two postscripts on Paul de Man’s historical materialism); 8. The Future Past of Literary Theory; Appendix Interview: Deconstruction at Yale.

An extraordinary book of rigor and troubling originality. Part of what is so disturbing about Material Inscriptions is that it reads both literary texts (Wordsworth and others) and philosophical or theoretical texts (Hegel, Descartes, Nietzsche, de Man) in more or less the same way, that is, with special attention to the rhetorical dimension of language.