Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism: Gauss Seminar and Other Papers - Hardcover

De Man

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801844606 ISBN 13: 9780801844607

Publisher: John Hopkins University Press, 1992

Synopsis

This volume assembles for the first time material written by Paul de Man between 1954 and 1981, including his previously unpublished Gauss Seminar lectures delivered at Princeton in 1967, three papers on romantic and postromantic issues, a commissioned essay on Roland Barthes, and two substantial responses to papers by Frank Kermode and Murray Krieger.

Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism represents de Man's reflections on some of the major texts of English, German, and French Romanticism and their reception in twentieth-century literary criticism and theory. The Gauss Seminar lectures in particular convey de Man's consideration of Romanticism as a distinct form of historical consciousness, and illuminate his conviction that this romantic historical consciousness had been a powerful influence on our own development of a historical identity. De Man had planned to use the Gauss lectures as a basis for a major historical study of Romanticism, but the volume was never completed and de Man eventually abandoned the project.

Drawn from four decades of de Man's career, these essays reflect the transition in the critic's work from the thematics and vocabulary of "consciousness" and "temporality" characteristic of his work in the 1960s, to the language-oriented concerns and terminology of his later writings.

About this title

Review:

"Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism is most absorbing when it reveals the concentric tiers that compose the self-enclosed question with which we are dealing, the question of the temporality of de Man's notion of temporality." -- Studies in Romanticism

"Presents the reader with de Man's main preoccupations and positions over a period of thirty years." -- Nineteenth-Century French Studies

"The principal interest of these texts... lies in their relationship to the long meditation of Rousseau that comprises the second half of Allegories of Reading, and in the way they illuminate the turn towards rhetoric that, de Man himself would aver, was the decisive factor enabling his mature work." -- Times Literary Supplement

About the Author:

Paul de Man was born in Belgium and taught at Cornell, Zurich, Johns Hopkins, and Yale before his death in 1983. His books include Blindness and Insight, allegories of Reading, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, The Resistance to Theory, Critical Writings 1953-1978, and Aesthetic Ideology. E. S. Burt is associate professor of French at the University of California, Irvine. Kevin Newmark teaches literature at Boston College. Andrzej Warminski is professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine.

About this edition

• Publisher: John Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0801844606
• ISBN 13: 9780801844607
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 232