Reviews
Abstract
128 Reviews Ortwin de Graef, Serenity in Crisis: A Preface to Paul de Man, 1939-1960 (University of Nebraska Press, 1993), and Titanic Light: Paul de Man's Post-Romanticism, 1960-1969 (University of Nebraska Press, 1995) These two books bring us to the heart of reading. Paul De Man - the subject of Ortwin de Graefs brilliant study - himself published a book called Allegories of Reading, where allegory becomes the trope through which the putative void at the heart of fiction (literature) would be signified. An alle- gory of reading, we might intuit, would, ideally, do nothing more than allow the literary text to signify the void at the heart of itself. At least this would be so were de Man's notion of allegory in Allegories of Reading to be consistent with the view of the literary text he defended in the 1950s and 1960s. However, rather than using the 'well-known' de Man of Allegories of Reading - the de Man of American 'deconstruction' - as his point of depar- ture, de Graef begins the first volume of his study by considering de Man's wartime journalism - and this, in order to get a bead on the latter-day decon- structionist