Paul de Man has been a major influence on American literary criticism and theory, first through his teaching at Cornell (1960-1967), Johns Hopkins (1967-1970), and Yale (1970-1983), where he was mentor to graduate students who went on to do work marked by his example, and then, beginning in the 1970s, by his writings, which gained attention in part through their association with the critical movement known as deconstruction. De Man was known above all for his uncompromising critique of pieties in the humanist study of literature and for his insistence on the demystifying potential of close reading. His work is best characterized as rhetorical reading, which means not only the study of tropes or rhetorical figures in a text but also the exploration of the rhetorical force of language which cannot be captured by or reduced to a grammarlike code. De Man is for many the model of...