Paul de Man occupies a singular position within twentieth-century literary theory. If Jacques Derrida destabilized the metaphysics of presence at the level of philosophy, de Man relocated deconstruction within literary rhetoric. His intervention was neither merely methodological nor stylistic; it was epistemological. De Man’s central claim is that literary language reveals the impossibility of grounding […]

A Comparative Study of American Deconstruction (Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman) American deconstruction, often associated with the “Yale School,” is frequently treated as a unified extension of Derrida’s philosophy into literary criticism. Yet this generalization obscures important internal distinctions. Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, and Geoffrey Hartman share commitments to undecidability,

A De Manian Reading of Ode: Intimations of Immortality Among Wordsworth’s poems, Ode: Intimations of Immortality is perhaps the most overtly metaphysical. It begins with loss—“There was a time…”—and proceeds to articulate one of Romanticism’s boldest claims: that childhood carries traces of pre-existence, a “visionary gleam” gradually dimmed by maturity. The poem appears to mourn

A De Manian Reading of Tintern Abbey 4 Paul de Man repeatedly turns to Romantic poetry—especially Wordsworth—not because it is rhetorically weak, but because it is rhetorically ambitious. Romantic lyric attempts to assert unity between mind and nature, self and world, memory and presence. It articulates claims about consciousness, history, and transcendence. For de Man,

A De Manian Reading of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Among the most decisive interventions made by Paul de Man is his distinction between symbol and allegory, especially as developed in essays collected in Blindness and Insight and later refined in Allegories of Reading. For de Man, Romanticism misrecognizes its own rhetoric when it

Reading as Infinite Commentary in Tintern Abbey Among the American deconstructionists associated with the so-called Yale School, Geoffrey Hartman occupies a distinctive position. Whereas Paul de Man foregrounds the rhetorical self-undoing of philosophical claims and J. Hillis Miller emphasizes narrative undecidability, Hartman turns persistently to Romantic poetry—especially Wordsworth—as the site where interpretation becomes both necessary

Rhetoric, Narrative Self-Undoing, and Undecidability in The Turn of the Screw Among the works most frequently mobilized by American deconstruction, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw occupies a privileged position. It has generated two dominant interpretive camps: the “apparitionist” reading (the ghosts are real) and the “non-apparitionist” reading (the governess hallucinate them). A deconstructive

If on a winter’s night a traveler 4 Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler stands as one of the most rigorous fictional enactments of poststructuralist theory. Where Waiting for Godot dramatizes différance through absence, Calvino radicalizes textual instability by dismantling narrative unity itself. The novel fragments into ten interrupted beginnings, addresses the

Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is arguably the most concise dramatic embodiment of poststructuralist philosophy before poststructuralism consolidated itself theoretically. The play does not merely dramatize existential waiting; it enacts the structural instability of meaning, the deferral of presence, and the collapse of metaphysical foundations. Read through Derrida’s concepts of différance, trace,

A Proppian Analysis of Morphology of the Folktale Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928) represents one of the most rigorous structuralist interventions in literary theory. While earlier folklorists classified tales by theme or motif, Propp shifted the methodological ground: he asked not what tales are about, but how they are constructed. His central claim