"Reading De Man Reading " was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Paul de Man, from the outset of his career, concerned himself with the act of reading and with discovering what a rigorous mode of reading can produce. The contributors to this volume--conceived not long before de Man's death in 1983--address his theory and practice of reading: the nature of those readings and what they signify for reading in general, not just for literary texts. De Man explored the act of reading because in it he could bring together--in order to cancel--the subjects known as reader and writer, the referent known as reality, and the medium known as language. In the act of reading de Man, the authors of this book ask where his work leaves us, what changes he made in the world of criticism and writing in general, and what we do differently because of him.

The contributors: Geoffrey Hartman, Jacques Derrida, Deborah Esch, Neil Hertz, Carol Jacobs, Kevin Newmark, Peggy Kamuf, J. Hillis Miller, Werner Hamacher, Hans Robert Jauss, Geoffrey Bennington, Bill Readings, Timothy Bahti, and Rodolphe Gasche.

Lindsay Waters is General Editor at Harvard University Press. Wlad Godzich is professor of comparative literature at the Universite de Montreal and co-editor of the Theory and History of Literature series.

"Demarcating the Disciplines " was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

With publication of this volume, "Glyph " begins a new stage in its existence: the move from Johns Hopkins University Press to the University of Minnesota Press is accompanied by a change in focus. In its first incarnation "Glyph "provided a forum in which established notions of reading, writing, and criticism could be questioned and explored. Since then, the greater currency of such concerns has brought with it new problems and priorities. Setting aside the battles of the past, the new "Glyph "looks ahead - to confront historical issues and to address the institutional and pedagogical questions emerging from the contemporary critical landscape.

Each volume in the new "Glyph " series is organized around a specific issue. The essays in this first volume explore the relations between the practice of reading and writing and the operations of the institution. Though their approaches differ from one another, the authors of these essays all recognize that the questions of the institution - most notably the university - points toward a series of constraints that define, albeit negatively, the possibilities for change.The contributors: Samuel Weber, Jacques Derrida, Tom Conley, Malcolm Evans, Ruth Salvaggio, Robert Young, Henry Sussman, Peter Middleton, David Punter, and Donald Preziosi.

At the onset of modernity in the sixteenth century, literature and history were wrenched apart. Wlad Godzich, one of the animators of the turn toward literary theory, seeks to restore historical consciousness to criticism after a period of its painful repression. In this sweeping study, he considers the emergence of the modern state, the institutions and disciplines of culture and learning, as well as the history of philosophy, the history of historiography, and literary history itself. He offers a powerful account of semiotics; an important critical perspective on narratology; a profound discussion of deconstruction; and many brief, practical demonstrations of why Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and de Man remain essential resources for contemporary critical thought. The culture of literacy is on the wane, Godzich argues. Throughout the modern period, language has been the institution that provided the condition of possibility for all other institutions, from university to church to state. but the pervasive crisis of meaning we now experience is the result of a shift in the modes of production of knowledge. The culture of literacy has been faced with transformations it cannot accommodate, and the existing organization of knowledge has been challenged. By wedding literature to a reflective practice of history, Godzich leads us toward a critique of political reason, and a profound sense of how postmodernity can overcome by deftly sidestepping the modern. This book will bring to a wider audience the work of a writer who is recognized as one of the most commanding figures of his generation for range, learning, and capacity of innovation.