About this Volume
Legacies of Paul de Man
This volume of Romantic Circles Praxis Series includes an editor's introduction by Marc Redfield, essays by Cynthia Chase, Jan Mieszkowski, Ian Balfour, Andrzej Warminski, Sara Guyer, Marc Redfield, Arkady Plotnitsky, Rei Terada, also appendices listing the courses taught by de Man at Yale, and making available a previously unpublished document by de Man, a course proposal for the undergraduate course "Literature Z."
More than twenty years after his death, Paul de Man remains a haunting presence in the American academy. A ghost who has never quite been laid to rest, and whose name still possesses conjuring power, de Man continues symbolically to embody an aspect of "theory" that resists easy routinization. Routinely taken to personify routinized academic "deconstruction," de Man routinely becomes an irritant in excess of the obsessions he inspires. These essays evaluate that legacy, which remains ongoing and uncertain, yet also massive and unavoidable.
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About the Romantic Circles Praxis Series
The Romantic Circles Praxis Series is devoted to using computer technologies for the contemporary critical investigation of the languages, cultures, histories, and theories of Romanticism. Tracking the circulation of Romanticism within these interrelated domains of knowledge, RCPS recognizes as its conceptual terrain a world where Romanticism has, on the one hand, dissolved as a period and an idea into a plurality of discourses and, on the other, retained a vigorous, recognizable hold on the intellectual and theoretical discussions of today. RCPS is committed to mapping out this terrain with the best and mo st exciting critical writing of contemporary Romanticist scholarship.
About the Contributors
Marc Redfield is Professor of English and holds the John D. and Lillian Maguire Distinguished Chair in the Humanities at Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Cornell UP, 1996) and The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism (Stanford UP, 2003). He is the coeditor of High Anxieties: Cultural Studies in Addiction (2002), and the guest editor of two special issues of Diacritics, "Addictions" (1997) and "Theory, Globalization, Cultural Studies, and the Remains of the University" (2001).
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Cynthia Chase, professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University, received her PhD from Yale University in 1981. Her publications include Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) and articles on theory, Romanticism, and psychoanalysis; and a Longmans Critical Reader, Romanticism, introduced and edited by her (New York and London: Longmans, 2003).
Jan Mieszkowski is Associate Professor of German and Humanities at Reed College. He is the author of a variety of articles on Romanticism, German Idealism, critical theory, and the relationship between literary and political discourses since the Enlightenment.
Ian Balfour teaches in English and in Social & Political Thought at York University. He is the author of The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (Stanford UP, 2002). He co-edited, with Atom Egoyan, Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film (MIT, 2004), and with Eduardo Cadava, a special double issue of South Atlantic Quarterly called "And Justice for All? The Claims of Human Rights." He's completing a book on the sublime.
Andrzej Warminski is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minnesota, 1987). He has also published many essays on literary theory, Romantic literature, and German philosophy. His two-volume Material Inscriptions is forthcoming.
Sara Guyer is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is completing a book called Romanticism after Auschwitz. Her latest project focuses on the poetics of homelessness with reference to John Clare and Friedrich Hölderlin.
Arkady Plotnitsky is a Professor of English and Director of Theory and Cultural Studies at Purdue University. His most recent books include The Knowable and the Unknowable: Modern Science, Nonclassical Theory, and Two Cultures (University of Michigan Press, 2002), a coedited volume (with Tilottama Rajan), Idealism without Absolute: Philosophy and Romantic Culture (SUNY, 2004), and the forthcoming Reading Bohr: Physics and Philosophy (Berlin: Springer, 2005).
Rei Terada is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. She is the author of Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the "Death of the Subject" (Harvard UP, 2001).
