Nothing but the Worst
Michael Wood: Paul de Man, 8 January 2015
The Paul de Man Notebooks
edited by Martin McQuillan.
Edinburgh, 357 pp., £80, April 2014,978 0 7486 4104 8 Show More
edited by Martin McQuillan.
Edinburgh, 357 pp., £80, April 2014,
The Double Life of Paul de Man
by Evelyn Barish.
Norton, 534 pp., £25, September 2014,978 0 87140 326 1 Show More
by Evelyn Barish.
Norton, 534 pp., £25, September 2014,
“... definition of the sign’. You have to like the unfathomable a lot to write like that. Evelyn Barish catches this note very well in an awkward but telling mixed metaphor. De Man’s ‘approach to literature … took as its bedrock a subversive doubt concerning the truthtelling power of language’. Even subversive doubt will become a bedrock ... ”