Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory

This title includes readings that work through tropes disclose the material inscription at the origins of literary texts. Focusing insistently on the practice of rhetorical reading, this book demonstrates how the self-undoing of tropological systems necessarily generates narratives which turn out to be allegories of their own conditions of (im)possibility. The volume also contains two essays on Paul de Man and literary theory, as well as an interview on the topic of ‘Deconstruction at Yale’. These latter texts are explicitly about the ‘place’ of rhetoric and its importance for any critical reading worthy of the name. As Warminski demonstrates, such ‘rhetorical reading’ is a species of ‘deconstructive reading’ – in the full ‘de Manian’ sense – but one that, rather than harkening back to a past over and done with, would open the texts to a different future. Features: new readings of texts by Wordsworth, Keats, Descartes, Nietzsche, and Henry James; and essays and an interview on Paul de Man and ‘Deconstruction at Yale’. It reflects on and exemplifies the pedagogical value of ‘de Manian’ rhetorical reading.