Post-Romantic Predicament

Paul de Man (1919-83) was the Sterling Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Yale University. He is the author of some of the most important works of literary theory and deconstruction including Blindness and Insight, Allegories of Reading, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, and Aesthetic Ideology. Martin McQuillan is a multi-award-winning filmmaker, journalist and writer. He is the editor of several texts by Paul de Man, including The Post-Romantic Predicament and The Paul de Man Notebooks. He teaches in the Sound/Image Cinema Lab at Falmouth University.

'De Man's readings of Mallarme, Yeats, and George in the 1950s demonstrate how a reflection on an authentically poetic vocation cannot help but produce a concomitant reflection on what constitutes a genuinely literary criticism and theory. It is fascinating to see how de Man's pushing of a Hegelian phenomenological "method" to its limits engenders what we now call "de Manian" rhetorical or "deconstructive" reading. The Post-Romantic Predicament is essential reading for anyone concerned with the question of "the literary". -- Andrzej Warminski, University of California, Irvine 'De Man's readings of Mallarme, Yeats, and George in the 1950s demonstrate how a reflection on an authentically poetic vocation cannot help but produce a concomitant reflection on what constitutes a genuinely literary criticism and theory. It is fascinating to see how de Man's pushing of a Hegelian phenomenological "method" to its limits engenders what we now call "de Manian" rhetorical or "deconstructive" reading. The Post-Romantic Predicament is essential reading for anyone concerned with the question of "the literary".

• Acknowledgements; Series Editor's Preface; 'No country for old men': Paul de Man and the Post-Romantic Predicament, Martin McQuillan; Paul de Man: Essays; 1. Introduction to 'The Post-Romantic Predicament'; 2. 'Mallarmé' (1960); Part I Hérodiade; Part II Igitur; Part III Un coup de dés; 3. 'Drama and History in Yeats' (1960); 4. 'Mallarmé, George and Yeats' (c.1959); 5. 'Stefan George and Stéphane Mallarmé' (1952); 6. 'Stefan George and Friedrich Hölderlin' (1954); Appendix: Dissertation fragment on Stefan George (c.1955); De Man's Bibliography to Chapters 2 and 3; Index.