Note: The report follows the general outline proposed by the Department of Education with the addition of one section (Section C, entitled Special Programs). Numbered sections under the headings D and E correspond to the numbered subdivisions of sections C and D in the outline.

Definition and Areas of Priority

Comparative literature has been an established field of study in European and American universities since the end of the nineteenth century: American departments such as Harvard and Columbia trace back their origins to the 1890s. The main expansion, however, took place after the Second World War, prompted by a renewed concern for the international aspects of our culture. By 1952, nine major graduate departments, a professional journal, a yearbook etc. has been established. A second wave of development occurred around 1960, under the impetus of NDEA-financed graduate programs [i.e. under the 1958 National Defense Education Act]. Thirty-seven comparative literature programs and departments are listed in 1963 and the figure has probably doubled since then; at least two new journals have been launched and more than 100 PhDs could potentially be produced every year.

This quantitative growth has been accompanied, on the whole, by a parallel qualitative development. In terms of student quality, graduate programs in comparative literature generally compare favorably with the neighboring programs in modern or classical literatures; many graduates have gone on to successful careers in teaching and research, and several important publications have put American comparative literature studies definitely in the forefront of the international field.

The following is a list of the teaching notebooks held in the UCI archive that accompany de Man's seminar program at Zurich, Cornell, John Hopkins and Yale: scope and content are noted under the notebook where appropriate. A full catalogue of the Paul de Man papers can be found at: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf6p30071t/

Box 10, Folder 11

Yeats and reading notes (Zurich) (1963, June–July)

Includes notes on European romanticism.

Box 10, Folder 12

European romanticism I (Zurich) (1963–64)

Includes notes on Curtius, Rousseau, and Yeats.

Box 10, Folder 13

European romanticism II (Zurich) (1963–64)

Includes notes on Yeats.

Box 10, Folder 14

European romanticism III (Zurich) (1963–64)

Box 10, Folder 15

Übungen, Valèry, Rilke, W. Stevens (Zurich) (1964)

Box 10, Folder 16

Mallarmé and George (Zurich) (1964)

Includes notes on Baudelaire, Madame Bovary, and Mallarmé.

Box 10, Folder 17

Rilke and George (Zurich); Hölderlin (Cornell) (1964–65)

Box 10, Folder 18

Eighteenth-century novel, Rousseau, Mme. de-Stael (Zurich) (1965)

Box 10, Folder 19

Eighteenth-century novel (Zurich) (1965–66)

Box 10, Folder 20

Eighteenth-century novel, Marivaux, Sterne, Wieland (Zurich) (1965–66)

Box 10, Folder 21

European romanticism, Keats and Kleist (Zurich) (1965–66)

Box 10, Folder 22

Narcissus (Geneva); Keats and Kleist II (Zurich) (1965–66)

Box 10, Folder 23

Twentieth-century novel (Zurich) (1966)

Box 10, Folder 24

Gide and James II (Zurich) (1966)

Box 10, Folder 25

Gide and James III (Zurich) (1966)

Box 10, Folder 26–27

Nouvelle Héloïse, Die Wahlverwandtshaft (Zurich) (1966)

You speak of doubleness, tripleness, and so on, and you immediately ask the question in a historical context by asking what has happened now that irony is again emphasized. That's surely not the case – whether there is now more emphasis or less emphasis on irony, and how you would measure just how much irony. You know, you can't be a “little bit ironic.”

But nevertheless, what you speak of is true in a sense. What you are speaking of is a certain degree of self-consciousness, self-awareness, doubleness, and one always assumes this in any critical enterprise, because it is in the nature of that enterprise to work on something that already comes to you so that you have the impression of knowing more than one who went before and having yourself in a distancing relation to it. So, inherent in the critical act is a self-reflective act, and there is certainly, in irony, a self-reflective moment.

If one looks at it historically, the great moment as far as the theory of irony is concerned would not be contemporary, but would be Romantic irony in Germany in the early nineteenth century. If you want to go to the major texts on irony, you will not find them in contemporary writers. You would have to go back to at least the nineteenth century.

Table of Contents for Unfinished Book, in Event of My Death

Epistemology of Metaphor CI [CI = Critical Inquiry]

Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion EI [EI = English Institute; he gave the piece

as a talk there in 1979] Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics CI Hegel on Sublime Kant: unfinished MLA paper

Resistance to Theory

Poetics and Hermeneutics: Jauss

Hypogram and Inscription: Riffaterre

Bakhtin unfinished MLA paper

If I live 5–6 years

It should become a book (Minnesota Press)

With addition Bakhtin + Benjamin

Ideology → Burke + Jameson??

5 essays on critical method

It should become a ‘major’ book Yale? Columbia?

Adding Kaus (sic) – Schiller – Fr Schegel (Fichte)

Also Kierkegaard – Marx

Now I have to write

Rousseau for Viking

Marionette Theatre for Columbia

(should be possible even in the 6 months that Dr Weissburg gives me) if I remain + or – as I am now

Since its inception Theory has been concerned with its own limits, ends and after-life. It would be an illusion to imagine that the academy is no longer resistant to Theory but a significant consensus has been established and it can be said that Theory has now entered the mainstream of the humanities. Reaction against Theory is now a minority view and new generations of scholars have grown up with Theory. This leaves so-called Theory in an interesting position which its own procedures of auto-critique need to consider: what is the nature of this mainstream Theory and what is the relation of Theory to philosophy and the other disciplines which inform it? What is the history of its construction and what processes of amnesia and the repression of difference have taken place to establish this thing called Theory? Is Theory still the site of a more-than-critical affirmation of a negotiation with thought, which thinks thought's own limits?

‘Theory’ is a name that traps by an aberrant nominal effect the transformative critique which seeks to reinscribe the conditions of thought in an inaugural founding gesture that is without ground or precedent: as a ‘name’, a word and a concept, Theory arrests or misprisions such thinking. To imagine the frontiers of Theory is not to dismiss or to abandon Theory (on the contrary one must always insist on the it-is-necessary of Theory even if one has given up belief in theories of all kinds).

The juxtaposition of Rousseau and Nietzsche has not been studied, partly because Nietzsche has nothing good so say about Rousseau, partly because their main common interest has for a long time been neglected in works dealing with these two authors. Of late however the theory of language and of rhetoric that both develop in their early writings has received more and more attention (on Rousseau in the work of J. Derrida, R. Althusser, implicitly in Judith Shklar, etc.; on Nietzsche in recent books and articles by Ph. Lacoue Labarthe, Gilles Deleuze, B. Pautrat, etc.). The combined presence, in both authors, of an explicit theory of figural language together with concerns of an ethical and philosophical nature is particularly illuminating. In preparatory studies for this book I have begun to establish the systematic link between, on the one hand, the theoretical considerations on language in Rousseau's Second Discourseand in Nietzsche's early course on rhetoric, and, on the other hand, the historical, ethical and political themes that remain prevalent in their subsequent works (The Social Contract, Julie, Emile; The Geneology of Morals, Zarathustra, The Will to Power). Similar linkages between linguistic concerns and thematic assertions are found in various literary figures of the same period (Wordsworth, Mallarmé, Proust, Rilke, and others). The book tries to make a methodological contribution to the study of the relationship between the linguistic and the historical interpretation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature.

The notion of textual allegory, as it derives from the Social Contract, provides the generalizing principle which makes it possible to consider theotropical or ethical allegories as particularized versions of this generative model and thus to break down the significance of such thematic distinctions. It also implies that the terminology of generality, particularity, and generative power has a degree of referential undecidability which should exclude any simplified metaphorical use of these terms, while anticipating the failure to achieve such vigilance, or such immunity to rhetorical seduction. If, for example, we consider the introduction of a theological dimension into the political context of the Social Contract as the thematization of a structure that cannot be separated from the textuality of any text (the inherent necessity, for any operative language, to postulate transcendental signification), then the “inclusion” of a deconstructed version of the Profession de foi within the context of the Social Contract is predictable, since both works can be considered as the same political allegory, the first on a figural, the second on a textual level. The Profession de foi is the text whose texuality the Social Contract deconstructs. This insertion of the Profession into the Contract becomes manifest in the chapter “De la Religion Civil,” which was presumably composed as an extension of the earlier chapter on the Legislator, and reads like a translation of the Profession de foi into the language of Nietzsche's Antichrist.

Statement

The project is the outcome of a fifteen-year-long concern with the history and the poetics of romantic and post-romantic literature in France, Germany and England. It began as a study of the poetry of Mallarmé, Yeats, and George written as a doctoral dissertation at Harvard under the title “The Post-Romantic Predicament.” In the course of rewriting this thesis for publication, I increasingly felt the need for a wider historical framework reaching back to the later part of the eighteenth century. At the same time, the experience of teaching alternatively in the US and in Europe has led me to reflect on certain comparative problems in the methodology of literary analysis. The results of these reflections appear in the book entitled The Crisis of Contemporary Criticism, scheduled to appear in 1970 at the Oxford University Press. This book, however, is only the by-product of the larger project described in this application, in which my experiences with continental and American methods of literary interpretation should find their practical application.

My continued interest in the problem of romanticism has focused on a group of texts by Rousseau, Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Keats, Kleist, Friedrich Schlegel, etc., as well as on works of a later period by Baudelaire, Flaubert, Mallarmé, Yeats, Rilke, George, Proust and others. From these texts, I have moved on to general considerations on distinctive aspects of romantic diction and rhetoric.

The selection combines the theoretical side of Rousseau's thought, which is primarily of interest to students of political science and of intellectual history, with the more purely literary components of the works. It also provides the means to make connections between these two aspects of the work, by including such texts as the “Essay on the Origins of Language,” in which the link between Rousseau's reflections on language and his political theory becomes manifest. The book could therefore be used in courses in European civilization, in political theory, in the history of the Enlightenment, in the European novel, in romanticism or even in linguistics. The inclusion of the two main theoretical texts in unabridged form (The Second Discourse on The Origins of Inequality and The Social Contract) weighs the contents in the direction of political theory, but the literature-oriented interpretation, in the introduction, notes and explanatory comments, restores the balance. The inclusion of shorted and lesser-known literary texts serves the same purpose, since the two main literary texts (Julie and The Confessions) are too lengthy to be included in toto. The integrity of the texts is maintained as faithfully as possible, by respecting the author's own internal divisions. For instance, the extracts from the epistolary novel Julie are always the complete units of the individual letters, given in their entirety. The excerpts have to be fragments but, whenever possible, the fragments are complete in themselves.

1. l. Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image

2. 2. The Contemporary Criticism of Romanticism

3. 3. Rousseau and the Transcendence of the Self

4. 4. Rousseau and Madame de Stael

5. 5. The Image of Rousseau in the Poetry of Hölderlin

6. 6. Patterns of Temporality in Hölderlin's “Wie wenn am Feiertage”

7. 7. Wordsworth and Hölderlin

8. 8. Time and History in Wordsworth

9. 9. Symbolic Landscape in Wordsworth and Yeats

10. 10. The Poetic Itinerary of John Keats

11. 11. Allegory and Irony in Baudelaire

12. 12. Rhetoric of Temporality: Romantic Allegory

13. 13. Rhetoric of Temporality: Romantic Irony

In the second part of the essay Truth and Falsity (pp. 512–15), Nietzsche sets up what appears to be a contrast, a polarity, between the man of “science” and the man of “art.” By a close reading of this section, you are invited (1) to discuss the structure of this opposition and (2) to examine its implications with regard to the relative value of both activities, in themselves as well as with regard to history.

Preparation

The following guidelines are given as suggestions to assist you in organizing your thoughts. If syou find them cumbersome or obscure feel entirely free to ignore them and to follow your own inclinations.

(1) How does the opposition between “science” and “art” relate to the theory of language as figuration developed in part I of the essay in answer to such questions as “What is a word?” (p. 506) or “What is therefore truth?” (p. 508).

(2) In section II, Nietzsche seems to be using a valorized language, as if he were advocating a preference for certain mental activities over others. Note also that many of the metaphors and polarities used in section I recur in section II (consider, for instance, such figures as wake/sleep [dream]; master/slave; falling/rising; building/destroying; play/seriousness; truth/delusion, etc.). How are the value judgments that appear in section II influenced by the use of these figures? Is the influence of the figures on the value statements consistent with the theory of figuration that is propounded in the essay?

All has been said, it seems, about symbolism. No period of literature has been explored more thoroughly; none to which the techniques of contemporary historical and critical research have been more conscientiously applied. The conditions for this exploration were highly favorable. We have all the texts at our disposal, not only in their final version, but in preliminary stages and with variations as well. The biographies of the main figures – Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé – are known in all details; there is hardly a letter ever written by them that has not been recorded. The complete editions stand as examples of scrupulous editorship. Mondor's day by day biography of Mallarmé remains a miracle of precision, in which the least eventful of all lives reveals its hidden depths and complexities, like a drop of water under a microscope. Even Rimbaud's mysterious Abyssinian adventure is accessible to the reader of his correspondence. As for the surroundings among which this poetry originated, they are close enough to us to be directly perceived. The Paris of today still contains the Paris of Baudelaire; Rimbaud's Charleville is an all too familiar picture for those who know the north of France and the secluded warmth of the apartment of the Rue de Rome could be a remembrance of our grandparents' homes. Ideological and historical trends of the period can be imagined, not like the abstract and fantastic picture which the medieval world will always have to remain for us, but in their actual, concrete presence.

The theoretical and somewhat controversial topic of the seminar, which deliberately mixes literary, critical, and philosophical materials, does not seem to have deterred applicants. More than sixty applications were received. The twelve applicants who were admitted were selected by a board consisting of Assistant Professors Marshall, Warminski, and myself. Criteria for admission were primarily based on (1) declared interest in literary theory, backed up by some publication, also and especially when the applicant's approach did not coincide with that of the seminar director and allowed for discussion and controversy; (2) some familiarity with the assigned reading material or with material of a comparable nature, especially where foreign languages are involved; (3) quality of independent project submitted by the applicant, as well as general strength of his dossier (authority of letters of recommendation, especially when they contain more than perfunctory praise, etc.). Criterion (2) proved to be an effective screening device for applicants who had little or no knowledge of foreign languages; in a seminar announced as Comparative Literature, some such knowledge seemed to be a more than legitimate requirement, especially since several of the assigned texts (Baudelaire, Hegel, Goethe, etc.), though they could be read in English, require familiarity with French or German.

[Note: *signifies previously published, ° signifies to be written.]

1. Epistemology of Metaphor*

2. Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion*

3. Diderot's Battle of the Faculties°

4. Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant*

5. Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics

6. Hegel on the Sublime

7. Aestheticism: Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel's Misreading of Kant and Fichte°

8. Critique of Religion and Political Ideology in Kierkegaard and Marx°

9. Rhetoric? Ideology (rhetorical conclusion)

The Resistance to Theory

1. The Resistance to Theory

2. Reading and History in H. R. Jauss

3. Hypogram and Inscription in Michael Riffaterre

4. The Ideology of the Body in Kenneth Burke and Roland Barthes°

5/6. Aesthetics and Society in Benjamin and Adorno

(with a concluding section on the theory of the resistance to theory)

Blindness and Insight

1. Criticism and Crisis

2. Form and Intent in the American New Criticism

3. Ludwig Binswanger and the Sublimation of the Self

4. Georg Lukac's Theory of the Novel

[sic] The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida's reading of Rousseau

5. Impersonality in the Criticism of Maurice Blanchot

6. The Literary Self as Origin: The Work of Georges Poulet

8. Literary History and Literary Modernity

9. The Rhetoric of Temporality

10. The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism Lyric and Modernity

12. Heidegger's Exegeses of Hölderlin