The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.
More Quotes from Paul Man:
The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.Paul Man
Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.
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The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.
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Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.
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Literature... is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most reliable of terms in which man names and transforms himself.
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