Disfiguring Monuments: History in Paul De Man's "Shelley Disfigured" and Percy Bysshe Shelley's "The Triumph of Life"
1991; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 58; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2873459
ISSN1080-6547
Autores Tópico(s)Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature
ResumoWhat does it mean to Paul de Man today? Given the recent revelations about his wartime past in Nazi-occupied Belgium, both this project of historicization and its attendant question of politicization inevitably gravitate toward that wartime past and its relation to de Man as the foremost practitioner of deconstruction in the American academy in the last three decades. While not denying the importance-indeed, the necessity-of the scholarship being done on de Man and his work for the collaborationist Belgium newspaper Le Soir, I want to argue against one assumption about the methodology implicitly tempting such scholarship, that of allowing one set of historical conditions to determine deconstruction's political identity and to explain deconstruction's reception of all texts. To begin to historicize de Man, I would argue, is to consider a host of sociohistoric nodal points that coordinate the production of de Man's critical texts as the reception of other texts engaged in a similar task of cultural (re)production and reception. Such a project must also observe the way in which history itself is constituted in its interrogation by both de Man's critical text and the text de Man critically reads. To de Man, then, is to mandate the necessity of a critical dimension that foregrounds history as the critical problem history itself is trying to understand. I thus turn to de Man's perhaps most violent statement on the unreadability of history, Shelley Disfigured, and, more important, to the text in which de Man reads this unreadability, Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Triumph of Life.' My purpose is to claim a
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