"The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements"
About this Quote
Calling a denial of modernity "the most modern" move is de Man at his slipperiest and, honestly, at his most revealing. The sentence is built like a philosophical trap: you step in expecting an argument about periods and end up caught in a reflexive paradox about method. De Man isn’t praising some cranky anti-modern backlash; he’s pointing to a signature modern gesture in criticism itself: the urge to unmask modernity as a story we tell to flatter ourselves, then to treat that unmasking as the only intellectually honest posture left.
The key phrase is "would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be". That double hedge is doing real work. It dramatizes the distance between how movements market themselves and what they enact. A critical method can declare itself anti-modern (nostalgic, anti-avant, anti-theory) yet still participate in modernity’s most characteristic habit: suspicion toward inherited categories, especially "literary modernity" as a stable, self-identical thing.
Context matters: de Man is writing from within mid-to-late 20th-century theory, where "modernity" isn’t just a timeline but a claim to authority. To deny literary modernity is to deny that literature progresses through clear breaks and heroic innovations. But that denial, de Man implies, is itself a late-stage modern sensibility: hyper-conscious of mediation, allergic to period labels, convinced that what looks like historical certainty is often rhetorical staging.
Subtext: modernity can’t be exited cleanly. Even refusal is a form of belonging, because modern criticism defines itself by its capacity to negate, revise, and destabilize its own foundations.
The key phrase is "would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be". That double hedge is doing real work. It dramatizes the distance between how movements market themselves and what they enact. A critical method can declare itself anti-modern (nostalgic, anti-avant, anti-theory) yet still participate in modernity’s most characteristic habit: suspicion toward inherited categories, especially "literary modernity" as a stable, self-identical thing.
Context matters: de Man is writing from within mid-to-late 20th-century theory, where "modernity" isn’t just a timeline but a claim to authority. To deny literary modernity is to deny that literature progresses through clear breaks and heroic innovations. But that denial, de Man implies, is itself a late-stage modern sensibility: hyper-conscious of mediation, allergic to period labels, convinced that what looks like historical certainty is often rhetorical staging.
Subtext: modernity can’t be exited cleanly. Even refusal is a form of belonging, because modern criticism defines itself by its capacity to negate, revise, and destabilize its own foundations.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|
More Quotes by Paul
Add to List
