The Ethics of Criticism by Tobin Siebers

Author:Tobin Siebers
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published: 2018-01-10T16:00:00+00:00

"In Autumn evening from a popular tree—

Each, like himself and like each other were,

At first, but soon distorted, seemed to be. . . ."

(528–31)

The lines expose a merging between the general and particular similar to the identifying sympathy found in Keats's “This Living Hand” and associated with the highest achievement of Romanticism.

10. Only its penultimate sentence suggests another mood. This line states de Man's characteristic vision of blindness and insight, but hints that the future of criticism—and perhaps his future—"is far from clear, but certainly no longer simply a matter of syntax and diction” (ix). Whether de Man is referring to a necessity beyond grammatical and rhetorical readings is a question that those acquainted with him personally might know better than I how to answer. It remains, however, that de Man was unable in his writings to move beyond the experience of death. Elsewhere I have argued that de Man's work elaborates a rhetoric of mourning that requires the idea of death, and not absence, to create its coherence. See “Paul de Man and the Rhetoric of Selfhood,” New Orleans Review 13.1 (1986): 5–9.

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