Focusing insistently on the practice of rhetorical reading, this book demonstrates how self-undoing of tropological systems necessarily generates narratives which turn out to be allegories of their own conditions of impossibility. It contains two essays on Paul de Man and literary theory, and an int[...]
Includes readings of Paul de Man's critique of aesthetic ideology and the strange 'materiality' that emerges from it. This volume explicates Paul de Man's late project of a critique of aesthetic ideology and attempts to extend it in ways productive for critical thought.[...]