The Rhetorics of Paul de Man
Abstract
This paper aims to define the extension of Rhetoric as conceived by Paul de Man, particularly in his well-known masterpiece Allegories of Reading, but also in in his last essays (posthumously collected in Aesthetic Ideology).
According to de Man, the figurative structure of language must be identified not only with literature, but with language as such. Figure dis-figure language by means of metaphor, and – at a second degree – allegory undoes figural language.
Perhaps the most important theme introduced by de Man’s late reflection about aesthetics, and especially about the link between rhetoric and ideology, concerns the critique of ideology. The unmasking of ideology should be the result of a rhetorical analysis conducted with the tool of «the linguistics of literariness». At the end of my paper, I try to interpret what is the meaning of this apparently structuralist expression, and why it should be related to a reading of Marx’s German Ideology.
Downloads
References
Benjamin, Walter, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928), trad. it. Il dramma barocco tedesco, Torino, Einaudi, 1999.
Cohen, Tom, Cohen, Barbara, Hillis Miller, J., Warminski, Andrzej, eds. Material Events. Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, Minneapolis-London, University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
De Man, Paul, Blindness and Insight. Essays in the Rethoric of Contemporary Criticism, New York, Oxford University Press, 1971.
Id. Cecità e visione. Linguaggio letterario e critica contemporanea, Introduzione e trad. it. di Eduardo Saccone, Napoli, Liguori, 1975.
Id. Allegories of Reading. Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1979.
Id. The Rhetoric of Romanticism, New York, Columbia University Press, 1984.
Id., The Resistance to Theory, Foreword by Wlad Godzich, Minneapolis/London, University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Id., “Epistemologia della metafora”, in Culler, Jonathan, de Man, Paul, Rand, Nicholas, Strategie della decostruzione nella critica americana, a cura di Marco Ajazzi Mancini e Fabrizio Bagatti, 1987: 84-105.
Id., Aesthetic Ideology, Edited with an Introduction by Andrzej Warminski, Minneapolis/London, University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Id., Allegorie della lettura, Introduzione e trad. it. di Eduardo Saccone, Torino, Einaudi, 1997.
Derrida, Jacques, “La mithologie blanche” (1971), trad. it. “La mitologia Bianca”, in Margini della filosofia, Torino, Einaudi, 1997, pp. 275-349.
Genette, Gérard, “La Rhétorique restreinte”, in Figures III, Paris, Seuil, 1972), trad. it. “La retorica ristretta”, Figure III. Discorso del racconto, Torino, Einaudi, 1976: 17-40.
Hillis Miller, Joseph, “Paul de Man at work. In these bad days, what good is an archive?”, in Cohen, Tom, Colebrook, Claire, Hillis Miller, Joseph, Theory and the Disappearing Future: On de Man, On Benjamin, with a manuscript by Paul de Man, London/New York, Routledge, 2012: 55-88.
Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism [1991], Durham (N.C.), Duke University Press, 1991, trad. it. di Massimiliano Manganelli Postmodernismo ovvero La logica culturale del tardo capitalismo, prefazione dell’autore all’edizione italiana, postfazione di Daniele Giglioli, Roma, Fazi, 2007.
Mazzoni, Guido, “La saggezza e l’ironia. Su Allegorie della lettura di Paul de Man”, Allegoria, XI, 51, 1999, pp. 23-42.
Warminski, Andrzej, “Introduction. Allegories of Reference”, in de Man 1996: 1-33.
Id., Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics. For de Man, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2013.
Copyright Notice
You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work, and to adapt the work. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
