Blindness, insight

At the LARB, a very good essay by Jonathan Freedman on the topic of Paul De Man:

De Man was a mediocre student (largely because he took engineering and chemistry courses), but he was steeped in different traditions than his US peers: existentialism, modernism, the avant-garde both before and after the second World War — indeed in America, he served as an important conduit to European thought, writing on Walter Benjamin before it was de rigueur, engaging in dialogue with Derrida when Derrida was largely unknown, turning in his later works to an encounter with Adorno. And there remain important continuities between de Man and his European elders. It’s important to remember, for example, that one of de Man’s major late essays is called The Return to Philology, by which he meant a return to a rigorous attention to the linguistic specifics of a text in and of itself without recourse to any humanistic pap or moral, ethical, or hermeneutical hijinks. Whether this is an adequate “return,” I leave to the philologists to debate; what seems important is that late in his life, de Man affiliated himself with a tradition of European thought that began, as Jeffrey Harpham has reminded us, in the 18th century’s demystification of Biblical texts and thence to Nietzsche’s madcap philologism before it rolled across the seas in the 20th century. More generally, explication de texte as a method was rooted, in its Comparative Literature aspects, in philology, and competed with — even as it ultimately merged into — the superior pedagogically (because more accessible) but inferior intellectually (because un-self-critical) Anglo-American “New Criticism,” with its emphasis on close reading as a method. Deconstruction in its de Manian guise needs to be understood under the sign of this genealogy, as an attempt to bring the demystifying essence of the philological perspective and close attention to literary detail inherent in the explication tradition together as a critical method.

Had a meeting today about the course I am teaching in the fall: it is called "Literary Texts, Critical Methods," and it is the required introduction to critical approaches that all our undergraduate majors take, preferably in their second year. An interesting challenge, but also a daunting one!

The Western tradition

Ah, it is such a luxury to be starting my morning with coffee and wireless internet! I forgot to write yesterday about what was probably the most interesting book I've read recently, William Gibson's Zero History, which I enjoyed very much but found not up to the standard of Pattern Recognition. Also enjoyed Andre Agassi's autobiography - both part of a book splurge at McNally Robinson last week. I finally have my Kindle in my hands, but have not yet opened the box and set it up - must do that before my Maine trip tomorrow...

Last night I had the perfect New York evening - my brother turned up at the loft where I'm staying (he is working as a carpenter on the Men in Black III production in Williamsburg, and the commute from Philadelphia means getting up at 4am and not getting home till 8pm, so he is going to try and ease things up by staying one or two nights a week in New York), we hung out for an hour, then G. and I went to see the very funny and apt Office Hours by A. R. Gurney at what is rapidly becoming my favorite small theater in Manhattan, The Flea. Young company The Bats are superb, and though the play is slight, I thought it was very well done; also, of course, as someone who has taught in Columbia's Literature Humanities program, I must be pretty much the exact/ideal target audience...

(And a delicious dinner afterwards at Petrarca: we shared piatto rustico to start [G.: "I never remember the food we eat, but I remember we had that before and how good it was!"], then I had a pizza with capers, anchovies and black olives and a specialty dessert of vanilla gelato with amarena cherries.)

Tonight I'm speaking on Clarissa and counterfactuals at the Fordham eighteenth-century seminar: should be fun...

Civilization and its discontents

Stanley Fish on core curricula and what should be taught in writing classes.