ABSTRACT
Not long ago Paul de Man could cheerfully say, with how much or how little of irony is impossible to know, that the task of criticism in the coming years would be a kind of imperialistic appropriation of all of literature by the method of rhetorical reading often called "deconstruction." "But there is absolutely no reason why analyses of the kind suggested here for Proust/' said de Man, "would not be applicable, with proper modifications of technique, to Milton or to Dante or to Hôlderlin. This will in fact be the test of literary criticism in the coming years."1 It can hardly be said that this task has been carried out in the years since 1979 with much systematic rigor. This is true in spite of the widespread influence of "deconstruction," in spite of the many books and essays written about it, and in spite of the brilliant work of younger critics influenced by de Man. But there has been more talk about deconstruction, as a "theory" or as a "m ethod," attempts to applaud it or to deplore it, than there has been an attempt to do it, to show that it is "applicable" to Milton or to Dante or to Hôlderlin, or to Anthony Trollope and to Virginia Woolf.
