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“... ground for attentive reading. The phrase which serves as the title of the collection is taken from Paul Valéry’s remark about certain ‘men with no great appetite for poetry’ who nonetheless presume to study, judge and cultivate it. Kermode cites it in reference to certain older advocates of the scientific study of literature (Wellek and Frye) and some ...”

“... translated as Psychology of the Unconscious) and at the end of his life he edited a volume called Man and His Symbols (1964). The radical Freud most of us read today was less interested than Jung in the idea of a collective unconscious, but the historical Freud dallied with it in his discussions of the symbol, especially after 1914, finding common ground ...”

“... became the dominant narrative, and indeed it is the basis of the state ideology of President Paul Kagame, who heads the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which took power by overthrowing the genocidal regime. It suits Kagame because it justifies his seizure of the state and his determination not to cede power. The basic fact – that the genocide was an ...”

“... well as weakening the structure, also undermines the confidence of the reader. Tournier is not a man to make a point once if he can make it a dozen times, or to use one word if he can use a thousand. Subjected to this immense performance of reiterative loquacity the reader increasingly responds with both ‘I know …’ and ‘What, really, does it ...”

“... Ordinary as the Uneventful (A Note on the Annales Historians)’ originated as a response to Paul Ricoeur’s critique of the Annales historians’ attempt to produce what he called ‘eventless’ history. Ricoeur’s argument is that history cannot be eventless, since it is tied to narrative discourse which requires the concept of an event. Cavell’s ...”

“... the woman professor at Harvard whom Paglia denounces in a lecture as nothing more than a ‘Paul deMan toady’, but how reassuring to hear that they were really ignorant sycophants. If a young woman with degrees from Yale and Oxford has written a feminist critique of the beauty industry which becomes a ...”

“... a sense of fatality where none need exist? What if poetry is not a critique of ideology, but (as Paul deMan suspected of this version of the poetic) its paradigm? It was with this sense of tragic inevitability in the Greeks that Brecht took issue. ‘This man’s sufferings appal ...”

“... vehemence by conservatives who would once have sneered at the kinds of stuff they turned out. Each man stood for an idea of European culture, preferred cats to children – for whom each wrote successfully all the same – and took an interest in prewar comedy, Eastern philosophy and the Church. In each case a studiedly colourless public persona half-concealed ...”

“... poetry tries to ‘iconicise’ that relation, make it appear somehow inevitable. This – what Paul deMan referred to as the ‘phenomenalisation of language’ – is the mark of ideology, and it is ironic that poets should typically regard themselves as the antidote to ideologists, giving us the feel and pith of ...”

“... in 1928 who studied English at Cambridge in the 1960s and who learned to argue with and against Paul deMan and Paul Ricoeur and Stanley Cavell during a long period as a professor at NYU. To describe this book as a product of that history is not to belittle it. From a wider ...”

“... complicated burdens of office, but Reagan appealed because he was able to show himself as a direct man who had the determination to dominate and solve problems. Carter is not at ease within himself; Reagan is a man who is at ease. Such judgments flow easily from the commentators. Take the case of Richard Nixon. He is ...”

“... that no Zeus is good Zeus, and that if we take Leda’s part we cannot well remain du côté de chez Swan. The chapter in question covers a lot of ground before it reaches these apparently un-Shakespearean termini, having a good deal to say about Wittgenstein, and his acquaintance F.R. Leavis, as well as about Measure for Measure, which Leavis admired ...”

“... blind with tears, led by the gleam/Of her own dying smile instead of eyes’ – the image, as Paul deMan observed of the ‘shape all light’ in The Triumph of Life, is ‘referentially meaningless’ – but there is meaning in the idea of blindness being hard to visualise. Shelley’s most famous ...”

“... if he could just get it over with. This is about as unreal as a thought could be, coming from a man who seems to have been plotting murder even before he allowed himself consciously to think of it, and whose whole frame of mind is haunted by what he calls consequence, the very effect he imagines it would be so nice to do without. The speech beginsIf it were ...”

“... him too dark, too lacking in charm, and too commercially unpromising to bother with? Singer the man is very much at the centre of the dispute; and, as Janice Hadda reveals in her fascinating biography, he was not by any means a leprechaun. A professor of Yiddish literature, a psychoanalyst and a very good writer, she shows that Singer, far from being the ...”