Hi, Mairead,


I read the essay "The Epistemology of Metaphor" with equal pleasure. De Man
is definitely very popular in the Italian academia. I am fascinated by the
style of his inquiry, specially in Allegories of reading, but now feel
unease with the allegations of anti-semitism which were raised in
conjunction with some unpublished articles which were reprinted
(discovered?) only after his death. I mean, teaching Comparative
Literature, his work is essential to me. I recommend Blindness and Insight
(1971), written before the Yale Group with Bloom and Hartman. To return to
the work I cited to Trevor, The Resistance to Theory, in fact De Man
claimed that we need to assert some form of control over the technoicality
of language and its related problems, and learn how to be vigilant readers
in order to discern the asymmetries of (in) a given text and the world it
represents (the author represents to the readers and so on…) In fact
(ahahhaha ) he warned, Mairead, against academic itself and the sly way we
impose on our students a vision of the world through literary criticism.
Trevor was right protesting, as I said to him, very right and also healthy
rebellious. So epistemology against this manipulative rhetoric forms that
critics exploit.

Again, the scenario of the academia you describe was very much fostered by
Barthes's attitude towards criticism which turned structuralist critique
into quasi- aesthetic literary artefact: one can judge the popularity of
his outlooks on literary criticism by the flourishing production of
commentaries on his work since his death in 1980. In fact, his Critique et
verite' and Le systeme de la mode (sorry, I cannot add French accents
writing on-line),have little philosophical/scientific character but rather
a literary slant so charming, so pleasing. So, here we are in the
Barthesian realm of critical aestheticism.
Were are you writing from, what Irish town, Mairead?

Ciao, erminia


On Sat, 3 Jan 2004 21:48:38 -0500, Mairead Byrne <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>One of the most enjoyable experiences of my life (so far) was reading
>(and reading) Paul de Man's short essay "The Epistemology of Metaphor."
>What a sizzling cocktail that was. The amazing and baffling thing about
>academic work is how heady and fun it is, but how untransmittable: all
>the academics are at the party sparkling in their own orbit. I've been
>in rooms with people whose preoccupations seem identical to mine, but
>their examples are different: and there's almost no point of contact.
>So we loop around ecstatically just missing one another. That's the joy
>and pain of academic life (if that's not an oxymoron).
>Mairead
>
>
>
>www.maireadbyrne.blogspot.com