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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
clear, comprehensive, & mostly convincing--unlike De Man,
By johnbell@yorku.ca (toronto, canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul De Man (Hardcover)
Why is this book out of print? It should be taught in universities as a classic work on 20th century literary criticism and "theory". Its take on the posthumous Paul De Man scandal is clear, comprehensive, and mostly convincing. De Man, a dead deconstrutionist, was revealed to have been a cad in his public and private lives. Lehman demonstrates how the equivoque and equivoation that are central to deconstrutionism allowed De Man to rationalize his past as a Nazi collaborator, as a liar to USA immigration and to influential American intellectuals in the 1950s, and as a shuffler off of responsibilities to his first wife and family, all as mere textual details that didn't need addressing in his later career as a very respected American literary critic and academic. I disliked De Man's mandarin literary criticism even before I knew he was involved in deconstructionism--I thought his insistence on universal textual equivocation, universal lack of definitive textual commitment, and universal textual self-referentiality was part of the conservative, literature-has-no-social-bearing school of literary criticism which dominated the academy in the 1950s, and remained vital though not unchallenged there in the 1960s and early 70s. I dock Lehman's book one star for his too indiscriminately lumping De Man and deconstrutionism with other, more socially involved movements in academic thought that Lehmann also happens to dislike.
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Genuine Classic That Never Should Have Left Print,
By
This review is from: Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul De Man (Hardcover)
"Signs of the Times" is one of those very rare books that can actually change your life by altering your consciousness about perception and reality. It's a fascinating, riveting and funny account of how Yale University deconstruction guru Paul De Man was exposed after his death as an anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator in Belgium during World War II. It does something unusual and extremely valuable: it turns the tables on the professional cynics of academic theory, by subjecting them to the same rigorous skepticism that they assume they alone are worthy to wield. Lehman's wonderful defense of objectivity, historical truth, and ideological non-dogmatism is one of the most entertaining, exhilarating books I've ever read. After reading it I would never again take at face value the relativistic blitherings of university "experts." Lehman's book does something wonderful: it assumes that a common, decently educated reader and citizen can come to know truths about life. What a fabulous, unique concept for contemporary intellectual life!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Underground Classic,
By
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This review is from: Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (Paperback)
Books on deconstruction tend to come in one of two varieties--those that are self-referential and highly reverent (like Culler's ON DECONSTRUCTION) and those that seek to explain deconstruction in a more grounded more linguistically accessible way. David Lehman in SIGNS OF THE TIMES thankfully falls into this latter category. It is no secret that deconstruction with its attendant de-valuation of logocentrism and the concept of Great Books has been the rule in academia since the 1970s. What Professor Lehman has done was to show how deconstruction arose and to identify its salient traits. Further, he discusses the lamentable case of noted deconstructionist Paul de Man who in his youth wrote various articles during WWII in the Belgian newspaper "Le Soir" that were virulently anti-Semitic.Part of the joy in reading Lehman's account of the origin of deconstruction lies in comparing his prose style with someone like Jonathan Culler whose own style of circularity well matches with the self-referentiality of orthodox deconstructionism. Both Culler and Lehman hold a PhD in English, but where Culler writes primarily for clones of himself, Lehman strives to write in a manner that is clear, consise, and intelligible--exactly the contrary to the spirit of Derridean deconstructive tenets. I do not mean to imply that Lehman is "dumbing down" an admittedly abstruse and convoluted topic. Rather, he proves that one need not get bogged down in a linguistic fog when the topic resists easy comprehension. The second half of Lehman's book is dedicated to coming to grips with the disturbing linkage of de Man's Nazi writings of the 1940s with his later exposition of deconstruction. If this linkage of the two is "disturbing" then Lehman insists that it is rightfully so. And I agree. Yes, on one hand, one must not automatically place an equal sign between two sets of writings spread apart over several decades, but on the other, if the logic of the later writings is used (misused?) to recontextualize the reality of the former, then it is eminently justified to call into question a theory of criticism that basically allows anyone to say, to do, or to write anything and not have to worry about consequence. It is not likely that SIGNS OF THE TIMES will ever be assigned on a required reading list for Intro to Literary Theory at Columbia anytime soon, and that is a shame.
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