Blindness and Insight

Paul de Man is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, where he has taught comparative literature since 1970. He has taught at Harvard, Cornell, and Johns Hopkins, and has held a chair in comparative literature at the University of Zürich. De Man is the author of Allegories of Reading: Figurai Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust., Wlad Godzich is associate professor and director of the comparative literature program at the University of Minnesota. He is co-editor, with Jochen Schulte-Sasse, of the series Theory and History of Literature.

`The most subtly argued book of its kind I have ever read' - Geoffrey Hartman`It is a wonderful book, compellingly argued, the product of a restless intelligence nowhere content to operate at less than full self-critical stretch' - London Review of Books

• Chapter 1 Criticism and Crisis; Chapter 2 Form and Intent in the American New Criticism; Chapter 3 Ludwig Bmswanger and the Sublimation of the Self; Chapter 4 Georg Lukács’s Theory of the Novel; Chapter 5 Impersonality in the Criticism of Maurice Blanchot; Chapter 6 The Literary Self as Origin: The Work of Georges Poulet; Chapter 7 The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida’s Reading of Rousseau; Chapter 8 Literary History and Literary Modernity; Chapter 9 Lyric and Modernity; Chapter 10 The Rhetoric of Temporality; Chapter 11 The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism; Chapter 12 Heidegger’s Exegeses of Hölderlin;