Today’s show is a presentation of Jack Foley’s essay on his onetime teacher, Paul de Man. Jack writes,
Between the time I knew de Man in the
early 1960s and his death in 1983, his work
underwent a considerable change of
direction—a change of direction which I
will not attempt to trace here. I will
concentrate on the early de Man rather than
the later because it was that de Man who
had the greatest impact on my thinking
Imagine the effect of words like
these—from the “Foreword” to de Man’s
book, Blindness and Insight—on a young
man who had seen the limitations of the
professors he was studying with all too
clearly:
If we no longer take for granted
that a literary text can be
reduced to a finite meaning or
set of meanings, but see the act
of reading as an endless process
in which truth and falsehood are
inextricably intertwined, then the
prevailing schemes used in
literary history…are no longer
applicable.
Part One.
March 30
Paul de Man, Part Two.