Critical Summaries: de man

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Monday, February 8, 2016

De Man, "Reading and History"

Posted by Posted by Sophie | at 9:05 PM | 0 comments

A critique of the reader-response critic Robert Jauss

ABOUT JAUSS

Hermeneutics--deals with the determination of meaning; Poetics--concerned with "the taxonomy and interaction of poetic structures"--56
They are interdependent: you need to know what is going on poetically (metaphor, etc.) in order to grasp meaning, and you have to understand the relationship of the content in order to ascertain the form it's in--56
"The synthesis [...] of poetics with hermeneutics" is the ambition of reader-response criticism--57
Jauss describes the historical consciousness of a given period as a "horizon of expectation." New works initially stand out--"silhouetted"--against the background, then become part of a background against which even newer works stand--58-9
"The historical reading as reception mediates between the formal structure and social change" or between "structure and interpretation." Example of Emma Bovary, who, by her formal aspects, "engenders, in the mind of her readers, a critical awareness of social conventions strong enough to put these conventions in question."--60

DE MAN'S RESPONSE TO JAUSS

MAJOR CRITICISM:

Argues that the psychology of perception cannot necessarily be applied to literature, because language involves many obstacles to understanding, as the phenomenal world does not. Hence Jauss's "horizon of expectation" metaphor may be wrong--62

MINOR CRITICISMS:

Criticizes Jauss's overreaching use of the aesthetic in his reading of Baudelaire's Spleen. Suggests he overlooks the "play" of the signifier--semantic effects on the level of the word (such as paranomasia). Instead of treating these to objective linguistic analysis, he subjects them to aesthetic judgment. In other words, he incorrectly decides "whether a statement in [the] text is to be taken as a figure or à la lettre" when dealing with a specific wordplay ("Boucher"/"débouché") in Baudelaire--64-66
Criticizes Jauss's deductions about periodization based on analysis of rhetorical tropes as being "mimetic," as serving a confirmation bias--67
Accuses Jauss of misunderstanding Benjamin's conception of allegory as "anorganic." De Man, like Hegel and (he argues) Benjamin, insists that allegory is completely "materialistic" "because its dependence on [...] the literalism of the letter cuts it off sharply from symbolic and aesthetic syntheses." Disagrees with Jauss's suggestion that allegory can reverse itself into beauty--68
Argues against Jauss's understanding of the sphinx in Spleen II as the figure of the poetic voice producing the poem, and his characterization of the sphinx as holding memories. De Man insists that the sphinx "himself is the inscription of a sign," "an emblem of forgetting," and therefore cannot be the productive voice of the poem--68-70

Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986)

Saturday, February 6, 2016

Posted by Posted by Sophie | at 7:44 PM | 0 comments

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

BUT

"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