The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980 Book

I do not have a strong enough grounding in philosophy -- or even literary criticism -- to fully assess this work. But as a way of dipping my toes back in to this kind of thing it worked and worked well. All of the essays are, obliquely, a defense of theory (or at least a claim that theory inevitably is produced by the strange thing that is literary discourse) and are concerned with pedagogy, but, of course, what that really means with de Man is close engagement with certain critics and streams of thoughts, and I like that as abstruse as some of the prose gets, his arguments are grounded in the aforementioned concerns and in illustrative readings. I particularly enjoyed his essay on Bakhtin as well as the title essay.

The greatest services he does, though, is to show how this theory turn in literary studies, which seemed so disjunctive (or at least was often portrayed as such) from how literary studies was down before is neither that far apart from nor that different with the close reading of New Criticism or the core aesthetic and linguistic and poetic issues/questions that go back to Kant.