Sweet Pain and Charred Bodies: Figuring Violence in The White Hotel

Abstract

In The Rhetoric of Temporality, Paul de Man defines and challenges a tradition of literary criticism has valued symbolism over allegory. The supremacy of symbol, conceived as an expression of unity between representative and semantic function of language, becomes a commonplace, de Man observes, that underlies literary taste, literary criticism, and literary history.' Coleridge praises symbol for its translucent quality, its potential to body forth eternal in temporal; de Man, however, calls attention to way in which illusory translucence culminates in what he describes as the seductiveness . . of