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Teachers' Resource Web Study Questions on Paul de Man The Resistance
to Theory (1982) 1. On 104-05, what does de Man describe as the key factor in the advent of literary theory? What does this new factor make less relevant or even irrelevant in the study of literature? 2. What is the usual meaning of the term "literariness"? How does de Man define it on 106-07 and again on 109? 3. What definitions have you come across in your studies for the term "ideology"? How does de Man himself define that term on 107? You have now read an essay by three deconstructive writers: Nietzsche, Derrida, and de Man; how would you say that deconstruction, broadly speaking, deals with the fact that we cannot simply go beyond, get outside of, or dismiss ideological frameworks that govern our thinking? 4. On 109-110, how does de Man describe the traditional relationship among grammar, logic, and rhetoric (the three branches of knowledge known as the trivium)? But what relationship does de Man ascribe to them? Why are "tropes" (meaning "figure of speech," the word derives from the Greek tropos--"turn, direction, way; manner, fashion, mode") central to de Man's understanding of that relationship and to his comments about the anxiety-inducing effects of "literariness"? 5. On 107, de Man raises several possible reasons for the resistance to theory, only to reject them as inadequate and narrow. What, then, is "the resistance to theory"? This question comes last for our class because de Man continually fine-tunes this definition: follow out the more and more precise statements he makes on the following pages: 108, 110 (column 2 top), 112 (column 1), and 114 (column 1). How do his definitions become more complex from one to the next? *The reading selection is from Davis, Robert Con and Ronald Schleifer. Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies. Fourth edition. New York: Longman, 1998. 100-14. |