Printer-friendly versionSend by email  Legacies of Paul de Man
Seeing Is Reading  Rei Terada, University of California, Irvine
De Man's notion of phenomenality is compared with the idea of
material vision attributed to him in the recent reception of his
work, and with ideas of mental 'seeing' or the impossibility
thereof in the work of Elaine Scarry and Timothy Bahti. These
various critical constructions of literary phenomenality
reinstate transcendental models of mind for divergent ends. De
Man's material vision, in contrast, may be understood on the
model of Kant's use of hypotyposis, as a figure for the analogy
to which we rightly resort when dealing with speculative
propositions about cognition. This essay appears in _Legacies of
Paul de Man_, a volume of _Romantic Circles Praxis Series_,
prepared exclusively for Romantic Circles (, University of
Maryland.    1. What do we see in reading? It might seem that
"see" is a murky word, one whose conflation of sensory
perception with cognition makes it a poor