Discontinuous Shifts: History Reading History

Notes

¹ All references marked as "RR" are to:  Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism.
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² All references marked as "AR" are to:  Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading.
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³ All references marked as "RCC" are to:  Paul de Man, Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism.
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⁴ See de Man's "Form and Intent in the American New Criticism" and "The Literary Self as Origin: The Work of Georges Poulet" in Blindness and Insight.
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⁵ See de Man's "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant" in Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology. All further page references to Aesthetic Ideology will be marked as "AI."  On de Man's reading of Kant's sublimes, see my "'As the poets do it': On the Material Sublime".
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⁶ It is worth noting that the alleged shift from "history" to "reading" was, in fact, always already a shift from "reading" to "reading," since the itinerary goes from de Man's having begun "to read [my emphasis] Rousseau," through his being "unable to progress beyond local difficulties of interpretation," to end up with "the problematics of reading [my emphasis]" (AR,ix).  That this "shift" from reading to reading is in fact—also always already—a shift from history to history is...the point! 
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