In Blindness and Insight

, de Man examines several critics and finds in their writings a gap between their statements about the nature of literature and the results of their practical criticism. Not only are the critics unaware of this gap, says de Man, but their blindness to it often leads to some of their most valuable insights. The central issue of de Man's work is the rhetorical constitution of the text, and this book, with its new introduction by Wlad Godzich and five additional essays by de Man, is meant to challenge readers to a new appreciation of their chosen task as readers of literature. Included in this new edition are the original essays on Binswanger, Poulet, Lukas, Blanchot, the New Critics, and Derrida's `of Grammatology', as well as five more: `The Rhetoric of Temporality', `The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism', `Heidegger's Exegesis of Holderlin', a review of Bloom's `Anxiety of Influence, and `Literature and Language'.

Paul de Man is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, where he has taught comparative literature since 1970. He has taught at Harvard, Cornell, and Johns Hopkins, and has held a chair in comparative literature at the University of Zürich. De Man is the author of Allegories of Reading: Figurai Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust.,
Wlad Godzich is associate professor and director of the comparative literature program at the University of Minnesota. He is co-editor, with Jochen Schulte-Sasse, of the series Theory and History of Literature.

Chapter 1 Criticism and Crisis; Chapter 2 Form and Intent in the American New Criticism; Chapter 3 Ludwig Bmswanger and the Sublimation of the Self; Chapter 4 Georg Lukács's Theory of the Novel; Chapter 5 Impersonality in the Criticism of Maurice Blanchot; Chapter 6 The Literary Self as Origin: The Work of Georges Poulet; Chapter 7 The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida's Reading of Rousseau; Chapter 8 Literary History and Literary Modernity; Chapter 9 Lyric and Modernity; Chapter 10 The Rhetoric of Temporality; Chapter 11 The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism; Chapter 12 Heidegger's Exegeses of Hölderlin;