Rhetoric As Strategy Of Deconstruction

Paul de Man is one of the most significant deconstructive critics in America,whose strategy of deconstruction from a rhetorical perspective is the majorcontribution to deconstructive criticism. The strategy, which re-cognizes the rhetoricof persuasion and the rhetoric of tropes, reflects de Man’s thoughts and analysis onrhetoric, narrative, reading, criticism and ideology. Taking philosophy, semiotics,rhetoric and linguistics as its concern, de Man’s strategy covers the texts of famouspoets, novelists and philosophers across American and European continents. Whilescholars demonstrate their interests in his reading strategies and interpreting hisimportant articles about deconstructive ideas or in summarizing his ideas on the whole,few have made systematic and comprehensive explanations on the tropes he discussed,only leaving interpretations on some specific articles, which results in an incompleteor a broken understanding of his critical thinking. Chinese scholars have developedtheir research on de Man from mere introduction of deconstructive ideas to theanalysis of some rhetorical terms. However, there is not a systematic study on DeMan’s understanding of rhetoric of persuasion and of tropes. Therefore, thisdissertation aims to initiate a relatively more comprehensive interpretation of deManian deconstruction from the perspective of rhetoric in order that a good commandof de Man’s deconstruction strategy can be achieved. It traces back the theoreticalsources of de Man’s strategy through his understanding of rhetoric, criticism,deconstruction, literature, language, etc, and presents de Man’s deconstructivethinking and the significance of his strategy from the perspective of rhetoric. It revealshow de Man combines his deconstructive ideas with tropological epistemology, andhow de Man re-cognizes the rhetoric of persuasion and tropes in the context of thecontemporary philosophy, linguistics and semiotics, and the rationality andirrationality of the re-cognition. It also summarizes the insights and blindness of deMan’s strategy so that his unique contributions to philosophy, linguistics, rhetoric andliterary criticism can be understood. Hopefully, on the one hand, it can demonstratethe consistency of De Man’s thoughts on deconstruction so that a comprehensiveunderstanding of his deconstructive strategy can be achieved; on the other hand, it canrestore the significance of rhetoric in contemporary literary studies.The dissertation consists of six parts. The first part is an introduction about DeMan and a literature review, on whose basis the theses and research methods areproposed. The first chapter explores the origin of de Man’s deconstructive thinking,introduces the historical background against which De Man’s deconstructive ideasdevelops, the connection between his strategy of deconstruction and modern cognition,and about the relationship between de Man and new criticism, De Man andstructuralism. The second chapter traces the history of rhetoric and interprets thesemiotic, rhetorical and linguistic foundation of the strategy by clarifying therelationships among rhetoric, language, signs, literature and epistemology. The third chapter concentrates on de Man’s strategy of deconstruction, mainly a study of thekey tropes such as symbol, metaphor, allegory and irony, and the rhetoric ofpersuasion, which has been viewed against the background of new rhetoric study. Thefourth chapter is about the insight and blindness of de Man’s deconstruction strategy.De Man’s insight is that he represents the thinking method behind the tropes byuncovering the special features of the particular trope, that he achieves the insight oftropological epistemology by combining tropes with cognition, and that he proposesthe strategy of deconstruction from the rhetorical perspective. The last part is asummary and evaluation of his strategy.The aim of this dissertation is, firstly, by integrating, interpreting, applying andevaluating de Man’s strategy of deconstruction from a rhetorical perspective, to helpto understand de Man’s rhetorical deconstruction thoughts, and by means of that, tohave a mastery of the theory and criticism after deconstruction and, secondly, toenlarge the vision of literature research and encourage the re-cognition of linguisticsand rhetoric, and an interdisciplinary study; thirdly, to avoid the misunderstanding andmisusing of deconstruction.