Romanticism and contemporary criticism : the Gauss Seminar and other papers /

The centerpiece of this collection of de Man's unpublished conference papers is the draft of his Gauss Seminar, presented at Princeton in 1967. There are six lectures (only one of which has been previously available), and those on Rousseau, H"olderlin, and Baudelaire will in time be considered among de Man's most penetrating essays. Readers of de Man will be struck by how important these lectures were to de Man's thinking and how continuously he drew upon them for his published work from Blindness and Insight (1971) to Rhetoric of Romanticism (CH, May'85). De Man makes here the compelling and controversial claim that the romantics (e.g., Rousseau, H"olderlin, and Wordsworth) overcame quite early in their development a belief that Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche would never abandon: namely, that "demystification can become a praxis beneficial to the personality or to the society." The romantic artist's flight from the empirical self into the transcendent, critical self and back again never leads to the delusion that the knowledge or experience thereby attained has any relation to the truth of nature or Being. This volume captures something essential about de Man's intractable skepticism and about his commitment to a "pure act of mind," the essential romantic act that leaves the critical self in the difference between nature and history and at the mercy of what de Man already here calls the "formal dimensions of language." A work of immense importance, tastefully edited and beautifully produced. N. Lukacher; University of Illinois at Chicago

For de Man, the main problems and interpretive keys to romanticism lie in the distinction between self and author and the role of time and history in romantic thought. Written between 1954 and 1987, the essays included here discuss the romantics' imaginative project of art and use of language, focusing on Rousseau, Holderlin, Wordsworth, and Baudelaire. De Man has brilliant things to say about the history and function of romantic thought as a precursor to the modern world, and his close reading and wide knowledge of the romantics are evident. In addition, those looking for insight into the current controversy surrounding de Man's alleged ties with the Nazis will find that some of his comments have a seemingly autobiographical touch. Recommended for academic libraries and large literature collections in public libraries.-- Gene Shaw, NYPL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.