Blindness & Insight: Essays In The Rhetoric Of Contemporary Criticism
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
At the crossroads of literary theory and philosophical inquiry, Blindness & Insight stands as one of the most provocative and enduring works of twentieth-century criticism, dismantling the comfortable assumptions that underpin how we read, interpret, and assign meaning to literary texts. Paul de Man presents a rigorous and unsettling argument: that critics are systematically blind to the very insights their own interpretations generate, producing a fundamental and irresolvable tension at the heart of all critical discourse. Through incisive readings of towering figures — Lukács, Blanchot, Poulet, Derrida, and the New Critics among them — de Man chronicles the internal contradictions that inhabit even the most authoritative acts of literary reading. This second edition, expanded with additional essays, cements de Man's reputation as the foremost American proponent of deconstruction, a mode of reading that refuses to let language settle into stable meaning. His prose is precise, demanding, and intellectually exhilarating, rewarding the patient reader with a transformed understanding of how literature speaks and how criticism inevitably speaks around it. A cornerstone text of the Yale School of deconstruction, Blindness & Insight remains essential reading for anyone serious about the philosophy of literature — and a persistent challenge to those who believe criticism can ever fully see what it seeks to illuminate.
Author: Paul De Man
Format: Paperback
Published: 1983
Genre: Literary theory
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
At the crossroads of literary theory and philosophical inquiry, Blindness & Insight stands as one of the most provocative and enduring works of twentieth-century criticism, dismantling the comfortable assumptions that underpin how we read, interpret, and assign meaning to literary texts. Paul de Man presents a rigorous and unsettling argument: that critics are systematically blind to the very insights their own interpretations generate, producing a fundamental and irresolvable tension at the heart of all critical discourse. Through incisive readings of towering figures — Lukács, Blanchot, Poulet, Derrida, and the New Critics among them — de Man chronicles the internal contradictions that inhabit even the most authoritative acts of literary reading. This second edition, expanded with additional essays, cements de Man's reputation as the foremost American proponent of deconstruction, a mode of reading that refuses to let language settle into stable meaning. His prose is precise, demanding, and intellectually exhilarating, rewarding the patient reader with a transformed understanding of how literature speaks and how criticism inevitably speaks around it. A cornerstone text of the Yale School of deconstruction, Blindness & Insight remains essential reading for anyone serious about the philosophy of literature — and a persistent challenge to those who believe criticism can ever fully see what it seeks to illuminate.