THE LURE AND THE RESISTANCE: ON PAUL DE MAN’S CONCEPT OF RESISTANCE TO THEORY
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53555/eijhss.v2i3.206Abstract
Literary theory gains its significance both as a continuity and as a radical rupture from the New Critical perceptions and methodology. It springs precisely from the contradiction between the theory and practice of new criticism itself. The advent of structuralism created a linguistic awareness into the production, dissemination and reception of texts. Deconstruction operates by disrupting the totalizing gestures of both literary texts and text that deal with literary criticism. Paul de Man’s strategy involves a steady troping of all sorts of hermeneutic strategies employed in the text. The resistance encountered by theory is the result of a conflict between the figurality of language and the intention of grammatizing it which is the ultimate aim of theory. When grammar is extended to include the para- figural dimensions of text, the result is a rhetorical residue. According to de Man this phenomenon occurs because there are rhetorical elements in every text that resists total grammatization.
References
De Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory. Ed. Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
Derrida, Jacques. Memoires: For Paul De Man. Trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler and Eduardo Cavada. New York: Columbia UP, 1986.
Dunn, Alan. “Forgetting to Remember Paul de Man: Theory as a Mnemonic Technique in De Man’s “Resistance to Theory” and Derrida’s Memoires.” Southern Humanities Review. 22 (1988): 355-385
Eagleton, Terry. The Significance of Theory. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990.
Goodheart, Eugene. The Skeptic Disposition in Contemporary Criticism. Princeton: Princeton UP. 1984.
Jay, Gregory.S. "Paul de Man the Subject of Literary History." The Textual Sublime:
Deconstruction and its Differences. Eds. Hugh J.Silverman and Gary E. Aylesworth. Albany: State U of New York P, 1990.123-137
Lodge, David. Ed. Twentieth Century Literary Criticism: A Reader. London: Longman, 1972.
MacCannel, Juliet Flower, "Portrait De Man." Rhetoric and Form Deconstruction at Yale. Eds, Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer. Norman U of Okhlahoma P, 1985. 51-74.
Norris, Christopher. The Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory after Deconstruction. London. Methuen, 1985.
