Critical Summaries

• Proposes "historical" as the correct opposite of "modern" (not "ancient"/"traditional"/"classical"/"romantic")--145
• Nietzsche (in Second Unzeitgemässe Betrachtung): "The ability to experience life in a nonhistorical way [is] the most important and most original of experiences." Forgetting the past ("when all anteriority vanishes") leads to spontaneity, action, genuine humanity--146-147 
• De Man calls this experience the quintessence of the "modern"--147
• "Literature has always been essentially modern" because "the temptation of immediacy is constitutive of a literary consciousness"--151-152
• Baudelaire's essay "Le peintre de la vie moderne" bears "an acute sense of the present as a constitutive aspect of all aesthetic experience." In Baudelaire, "The human figures that epitomize modernity are defined by experiences such as childhood or convalescence, a freshness of perception that results from a slate wiped clear, from the absence of a past that has not yet had time to tarnish the immediacy of perception." Baudelaire: artist must be "always, spiritually, in the state of mind of the convalescent"--156-157
• Baudelaire: "La mémoire du présent" as something that is at risk if one gets absorbed in the past--157 

•  "Modernity and history relate to each other in a curiously contradictory way that goes beyond antithesis or opposition." "Modernity becomes a principle of origination and turns at once into a generative power that is itself historical"--150-151
• Example from literature: "Never is Baudelaire as close to his predecessor Rousseau as in the extreme modernity of his latest prose poems, and never is Rousseau as tied to his literary ancestors as when he pretends to have nothing more to do with literature." 
• This contradiction makes up "the distinctive character of literature" (162). See below.

• Calls into question the "specificity" of literature "as an existing entity susceptible to historical description." In truth, literature "both betrays and obeys its own mode of being": You want to escape from literature and from history. The venue in which you do this is literature (and history).--163-164.
• The problem with structuralism/formalism as a way of reading literature: "If literature rested at ease within its own self-definition, it could be studied according to methods that are scientific rather than historical"--but it doesn't. In fact there is "the fluctuating movement of aborted self-definition"--in other words, modernity--which structuralism/formalism denies.--164

Personally interesting: "Fashion (mode) can [...] be [...] what remains of modernity after the impulse has subsided, as soon [...] as it has changed from being an incandescent point in time into a reproducible cliché[....] Fashion is like the ashes left behind by the uniquely shaped flames of the fire, the trace alone revealing that a fire actually took place" (147)

De Man, Paul. 1983. Blindness and insight: essays in the rhetoric of contemporary criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.