著者

新田 孝行

出版者

美学会

雑誌

美學 (ISSN:05200962)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.60, no.2, pp.44-55, 2009-12-31

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The development of Paul de Man's deconstruction as well as his theory of reading is closely related to the transformation of his discourse about music. In "The Rhetoric of Blindness (1971)", he states that melody is superior to harmony since the former deconstructs the mistaken illusion of imitation as his famous "deconstructive reading" does. Melody functions as a metaphor of the reading. What is at stake in "Shelley Disfigured (1979)", however, is neither melody nor harmony but measure. Measure is defined as articulated sound, present in both music and language. Reading merely according to the rules of measure or punctuation, called "syntactical or grammatical scansion", is another more important de Manian deconstruction, for the difference between the order of words (grammar) and their meanings (rhetoric), which de Man sees as most problematic, could be deconstructed by accident, as a result of failure to decide how to punctuate sentences in the process of the reading.