Warminski A. Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. — 248 p. — ISBN10: 0748681221; ISBN13: 978-0748681228.This title includes readings that work through tropes disclose the material inscription at the origins of literary texts. Focusing insistently on the practice of rhetorical reading, this book demonstrates how the self-undoing of tropological systems necessarily generates narratives which turn out to be allegories of their own conditions of (im)possibility. The volume also contains two essays on Paul de Man and literary theory, as well as an interview on the topic of 'Deconstruction at Yale'. These latter texts are explicitly about the 'place' of rhetoric and its importance for any critical reading worthy of the name. As Warminski demonstrates, such 'rhetorical reading' is a species of 'deconstructive reading' - in the full 'de Manian' sense - but one that, rather than harkening back to a past over and done with, would open the texts to a different future. Features: new readings of texts by Wordsworth, Keats, Descartes, Nietzsche, and Henry James; and essays and an interview on Paul de Man and 'Deconstruction at Yale'. It reflects on and exemplifies the pedagogical value of 'de Manian' rhetorical reading.Facing Language: Wordsworth's First Poetic Spirits ("Blest Babe," "Drowned Man," "Blind Beggar")
Aesthetic Ideology and Material Inscription: On Hegel's Aesthetics and Keats's Urn
Spectre Shapes: "The Body of Descartes?"
Reading for Example: A Metaphor in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy
Towards a Fabulous Reading: Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lie in the Extramoral Sense"
Reading Over Endless Histories: Henry James's "The Altar of the Dead"
Ending Up/Taking Back (with Two Postscripts on Paul de Man's Historical Materialism)
The Future Past of Literary TheoryAppendix Interview: "Deconstruction at Yale"