This is a book of rhetorical readings whose theory and practice comes out of a particular teaching experience at Yale University: an undergraduate course called “Reading and Rhetorical Structures.” Indeed, a number of the chapters started out as lectures in this course. The course was conceived by Paul de Man and co-taught by him and Geoffrey Hartman, together with a number of Teaching Assistants who would usually give one lecture during the semester. I had the good fortune to serve as Teaching Assistant in this course and then as co-lecturer – once with Hartman, once with de Man, and then twice with Kevin Newmark – from 1979 to 1987. (De Man designed the course somewhat on the model of still another undergraduate course at Harvard [Hum 6] in which he served during his graduate student days as a Teaching Assistant for Reuben Brower.) The course was focused insistently on the practice of rhetorical reading and followed an itinerary from short poetic texts to narratives by way of a detour through philosophical or theoretical texts. The book follows this itinerary. It begins with some readings of poetry by Wordsworth and Keats that try to take into account the rhetorical dimension of the texts. After a detour through rhetorical readings of the interplay of trope and concept in (and the peculiar narrativity of) some “theoretical” texts by Descartes and Nietzsche, it reads a tale by Henry James to demonstrate how the self-undoing of tropological systems necessarily generates narratives which, in the end, turn out to be allegories of their own conditions of (im)possibility.