Allegories of Reading

'Through elaborate and elegant close readings of poems by Rilke, Proust's Remembrance, Nietzsche's philosophical writings and the major works of Rousseau, de Man concludes that all writing concerns itself with its own activity as language, and language, he says is always unreliable, slippery, impossible.... Literary narrative, because it must rely on language, tells the story of its own inability to tell a story.... De Man demonstrates, beautifully and convincingly, that language turns back on itself, that rhetoric is untrustworthy.' Julia Epstein, Washington Post Book World