On Insight And Blindness Of Paul De Man's Rhetorical Criticism

As one of the oldest humanities, rhetoric has been equated with "artistic speech" or "the art of persuasion" traditionally. As a human practice, rhetoric and language developed simultaneously. Although this statement was difficult to verify as the origin of language, it has become the consensus of scholars. Rhetoric has long been considered the classic art of eloquence, using language to persuade others, including speech and text. And rhetorical criticism derived from Plato's research on rhetorical effect, inspected rhetor's qualifications and motivation and measured all the rhetorical activities with criteria of "real" and "moral". Nowadays, moral standard still use to define the rhetorical criticism on speech, even rooted in all activities of rhetorical criticism-whether speech or text. Plato's criteria provided the necessary space to this art, however, since then rhetoric branded two faults:"rhetoric is opposite to the natural language" and "rhetoric is incompatible with the truth and the virtual correction". Not until Nietzsche declared "language is rhetorical" and "language itself is the result of the Art of Rhetoric," really subvert the modernist ideas on the rhetoric's "artificial pretensions" impression.Reading Nietzsche's rhetoric concept, De Man considered rhetoric is essential existence rooted in the language, conveyed an opinion without any intention to express so-called truth. De Man actually paid great attention to the close reading of "new criticism", and notes the rhetorical features of language and uncertainty in language and meaning, infinite interpretation space in language. Proceeding from this standpoint, Paul De Man built his American deconstructive criticism theory, which combined with the French scholar Jacques Derrida's deconstruction spirit. De Man did not hesitate to oppose the study of referential relations in literature and support the uncertainty model between grammar and rhetoric-the grammatical rhetoric and rhetorical grammar; rhetoric reading is just the process of inter-twining of persuasive and destructive.This paper represents Paul De Man's the way of rhetorical reading in context, focus on the main chapters of his essays in different periods with the topic of rhetoric, detail rhetorical criticism, a rhetorical reading on text, whose basis and operation methods. In the ensuing chapters, this paper will sort out problems arise in summarized, including three perspectives:the operation paradigm of New Criticism, meaning slip in deconstruction and text interpretation cycle. And then, some practical ways will be proposed and further understanding the embodiment of the juxtaposition in Paul De Man's rhetorical criticism and deconstruction.