Rhetorical Readings

Abstract

This 1980 text describes a seminar that Paul de Man taught in 1981 at Yale University. The seminar deals with a central problem in contemporary literary theory from a pedagogical, rather than from a purely theoretical, perspective. It investigates how an awareness of the rhetorical properties of language influences the modalities and expectations of our reading and, consequently, of the way in which the reading of literary works is taught to undergraduates. This pragmatic approach to rhetorical reading is based on the experience of an experimental course for Yale undergraduates taught for the last four years. The assigned readings consist, for the most part, of literary and philosophical primary texts rather than of contemporary works of literary theory. The tentative list includes (in the order of their appearance) texts by John Keats, Charles Pierre Baudelaire, William Butler Yeats, Blaise Pascal, Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist, Henry James, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, possibly Herman Melville or Johann Wolfgang von Goethe or Marcel Proust, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Ricoeur.