The voices of Paul de Man

Abstract

This article argues that analysis of fictional point of view, especially through the effects of speech act categories, has important implications for the analysis of non-fictional discourse. It takes Paul de Man's Allegories of Reading as its example and demonstrates that a multi-layered structure of different voices and personalities creates an untheorised confusion between a text and its reading: a confusion which is seen as a key factor in the impact of deconstruction in literary studies. It examines the status of the metalingual propositions which de Man formulates in this mode as the allegorical meanings of literary texts, and claims that the critique of reference assembled by these readings is subverted by the movements in point of view in the argument.

Keywords

authority deconstruction de Man Paul focalisation metaphor reference ventriloquy

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Booth, W. (1961) The Rhetoric of Criticism, University of Chicago Press, Chicago

De Man, P. (1979) Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust, Yale University Press, New Haven

De Man, P. (1983) Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn, Methuen, London

Graham, J. (1985) (ed.) Differences in Translation, Cornell University Press, Ithaca

Jakobson, R. (1960) Closing statement: linguistics and poetics, in T. A. Sebeok (ed.) (1960) Style in Language, M. I. T. Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Leech, G. and Short, M. (1981) Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose Longman, London and New York

Miller, J.H. (1989) ‘Reading’ part of a paragraph in ‘Allegories of Reading’, in W. Godzich and L. Waters (eds.) Reading de Man Reading, University of Minneapolis Press, Minnesota, pp. 155–70

Norris, C. (1988) Paul de Man, Deconstruction and the Critique of Aesthetic Ideology, Routledge, London and York

Todorov, T. (1981) Introduction to Poetics, Harvester Press, Brighton

10.

Wordsworth, A. (1987) Derrida and Foucault: writing the history of historicity, in D. Attridge et al. (eds) Post-structuralism and the Question of History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 116–25