Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust

"Through eleavorate & elegant close readings of poems by Rilke, Proust, Nietzxhes and the major works of Rousseau, de Man concludes that all writing concerns itself with its own activity as language, & language, he says, is always unreliable, slippery, impossible...Literary narrative, because it must rely on language, tells the story of its own inability to tell a story.... De Man demonstrates, beautifully & convincingly, that language turns back on itself, that rhetoric is untrustworthy." Julie Epstein, Washington Post Book World