Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Theory & History of Literature)

Rating:
Summary: A Boring and Pedantic Book
Review: by a soulless man. De MAn understands nothing about the texts he reads, adn the reason for this is that it is clear that he has no real love of literature.

Rating:
Summary: de man
Review: I must confess a sympathy for de man. He usually gets pilloried by the right and everyone who is for truth, justice and the american way, but his readings of texts are very precise. There is a certain mathematicism in de man, such that his interpretations can be stated very quickly and don't require the accumulation of much detail. For instance, his discussion of the second discourse as an allegory and the contrast of painting to music is very interesting, although I suspect that he borrows alot from Benjamin (who I have not read). The structure of the 2nd discourse is the argument of the 2nd discourse--very elegant and precise. Ultimately wrong, but there you go. Unfortunately, the precision has the effect of reducing texts to their form. For instance, if we know that "leonine Achilles" is a metaphor, and then think the structure of metaphor, we know nothing about why Achilles is compared to a lion, we know nothing more about Homer or the Iliad. De man is ultimately precise but dull.

Rating:
Summary: No more intentional fallacy
Review: Paul de Man's "Blindness and Insight" stands as one of the cornerstones in contemporary literary criticism. Not only does De Man understand the essential open-endedness of every text, but also he is right when asserting the prior role of the reader in that open-endedness of every text and the rejection of the intentionality on behalf of the author. As Wlad Godzich asserts, "De Man does not read then to constitute his identity or that of the text, nor to reach some beyond of the text, by whatever name it may be called. He seeks to locate the blind spot of the text as the organizer of the space of the vision contained in the text, and the vision's concomitant blindness."
The intentionality of the author highly acclaimed by the New Critics is, from now on, collapsed. As a reader in favor of the active role of the reading process I must say this is a valuable work to understand the process of critical reading.