Allegories of reading figural language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust
- New Haven : Yale University Press, 1982
- xi, 305 p. ; 24 cm
Includes index.
Through eleavorate & elegant close readings of poems by Rilke, Proust, Nietzsches and the major works of Rousseau, de Man concludes that all writing concerns itself with its own activity as language, & language, he says, is always unreliable, slippery, impossible...Literary narrative, because it must rely on language, tells the story of its own inability to tell a story.... De Man demonstrates, beautifully & convincingly, that language turns back on itself, that rhetoric is untrustworthy.
9780300028454
Allegory figures of speech french literature German literature history Deconstructionism