First published in 1983. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Paul de Man is often associated with an era of high theory, an era it is argued may now be coming to a close. This book, written by three leading contemporary scholars, includes both a transcript and facsimile print of a previously unpublished text by de Man of his handwritten notes for a lecture on Walter Benjamin. Challenging and relevant, this volume presents de Man 's work as a critical resource for dealing with the most important questions of the twenty-first century and argues for the place of theory within it.

The humanities are flooded with crises of globalism, capitalism and terrorism, contemporary narratives of financial collapse, viral annihilation, species extinction, environmental disaster and terrorist destruction. Cohen, Colebrook and Miller draw out the implications of these crises and their narratives and, reflecting on this work by de Man, explore the limits of political thinking, of historical retrieval and the ethics of archives and cultural memory.

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.

First published in 1983. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This last work by Paul de Man before his death in 1983 brings together what is essentially his complete work on the study of European Romanticism and post-Romanticism.

A culmination of de Man's thoughts on philosophy, politics and history. The book presents an inquiry into the relation of rhetoric, epistemology and aesthetics, that offers radical notions of materiality. De Man reads Kant and Hegel with a combination of philosophical vigour and interpretive pressure. The texts collected here were written or delivered as lectures during the last years of Man's life, between 1977 and 1983. Many of them have never been available previously in any form; these include essays from Kant's materialism, his relation to Schiller, and the concept of irony.

This important theoretical work by Paul de Man sets forth a mode of reading and interpretation based on exemplary texts by Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. The readings start from unresolved difficulties in the critical traditions engendered by these authors, and they return to the places in the text where those difficulties are most apparent or most incisively reflected upon. The close reading leads to the elaboration of a more general model of textual understanding, in which de Man shows that the thematic aspects of the texts-their assertions of truth or falsehood as well as their assertions of values-are linked to specific modes of figuration that can be identified and described. The description of synchronic figures of substitution leads, by an inner logic embedded in the structure of all tropes, to extended, narrative figures or allegories. De Man poses the question whether such self-generating systems of figuration can account fully for the intricacies of meaning and of signification they produce. Throughout the book, issues in contemporary criticism are addressed analytically rather than polemically. Traditional oppositions are put in question by a rhetorical analysis which demonstrates why literary texts are such powerful sources of meaning yet epistemologically so unreliable. Since the structure which underlies this tension belongs to language in general and is not confined to literary texts, the book, starting out as practical and historical criticism or as the demonstration of a theory of literary reading, leads into larger questions pertaining to the philosophy of language. "Through elaborate and elegant close readings of poems by Rilke, Proust's Remembrance, Nietzsche's philosophical writings and the major works of Rousseau, de Man concludes that all writing concerns itself with its own activity as language, and language, he says, is always unreliable, slippery, impossible....Literary narrative, because it must rely on language, tells the story of its own inability to tell a story....De Man demonstrates, beautifully and convincingly, that language turns back on itself, that rhetoric is untrustworthy."-Julia Epstein, Washington Post Book World "The study follows out of the thinking of Nietzsche and Genette (among others), yet moves in strikingly new directions....De Man's text, almost certain to be endlessly provocative, is worthy of repeated re-reading."-Ralph Flores, Library Journal "Paul de Man continues his work in the tradition of 'deconstructionist criticism,'... [which] begins with the observation that all language is constructed; therefore the task of criticism is to deconstruct it and reveal what lies behind. The title of his new work reflects de Man's preoccupation with the unreliability of language. ... The contributions that the book makes, both in the initial theoretical chapters and in the detailed analyses (or deconstructions) of particular texts are undeniable."-Caroline D. Eckhardt, World Literature Today

In occupied Belgium during World War II, Paul de Man (1919-1983) wrote music, lecture, and exhibition reviews, a regular book column, interviews, and articles on cultural politics for the Brussels daily newspaper "Le Soir," From December 1940 until he resigned in November 1942, de Man contributed almost 200 articles to this and another newspaper, both then controlled by Nazi sympathizers and vocal advocates of the "new order."
Later to become one of the most respected and influential literary theorists in America, de Man, then 21 and 22 years old, wrote primarily as the chief literary critic for "Le Soir," His weekly column reviewed the latest novels and poetry from Belgium, France, Germany, and England. De Man commented extensively on major propaganda expositions, and interviewed leading writers and cultural figures, including Paul Valery and the future Vichy Education minister Abel Bonnard.

The political extremes of de Man's wartime writing are marked by two articles. His single anti-Semitic article, "Les Juifs dans la litterature actuelle" (4 March 1941), acquiesces in the deportation of Jews to "a Jewish colony isolated from Europe." But de Man later argued in defense of a Resistance-linked journal ("A propos de la revue "Messages, "" 14 July 1942) against the "totalitarian" censors' "unconsidered attacks."

This volume reprints in facsimile all of de Man's articles in "Le Soir" as well as three articles he wrote prior to the occupation in 1940 as editor of the liberal "Cahiers du Libre Examen." It also includes English translations of the ten articles written in Flemmish for the Antwerp paper "Het Vlaamsche Land," in March-October 1942. The collection appears underthe auspices of the "Oxford Literary Review," England's leading theoretical journal for over a decade.