A Language Without Us: Reality and Literary Theory
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24310/metyper.35.2026.22004Keywords:
Literary Theory, New Realism , Rhetoric, Materialism , MetonymyAbstract
Philosophy often turns to other disciplines to verify its own claims. For example, the new realism, or speculative realism, has paid attention to literary theory, despite the latter often seeming to declare the impossibility of knowing texts and objects. This article reviews the foundations of literary theory that could establish a relationship between literary theory and new realism. To this end, it considers the work of the theorist and critic Paul de Man, who developed a materialist approach to literary experience.
Downloads
References
Burg, Evelyn. “What’s in a Name? Twentieth-Century Realism in Kenneth Burke’s Aesthetic”. Modern Intellectual History 13, núm. 3 (2016): 713-745. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244315000098
Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520341715
Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520353237
Cavell, Stanley. “Politics as Opposed to What?” Critical Inquiry 9, núm. 1 (1982): 157-178. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/448193
Cohen, Tom; Hillis Miller, J.; Cohen, Barbara. “A ‘materiality without Matter’?” En Cohen, Tom; Cohen, Barbara; Hillis Miller, J.; Warminski, Andrej, Material Events. Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory. University of Minnesota Press, 2001, VII-XXV.
De Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
De Man, Paul. “Roland Barthes and the Limits of Structuralism”. Yale French Studies, núm. 77 (1990): 177-190. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/2930153
Derrida, Jacques. Memorias para Paul de Man. Barcelona: Gedisa, 2011.
Durham, Weldom B. “Kenneth Burke’s Concept of Substance”. Quaterly Journal of Speech, vol. 66 (1980): 351-364. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00335638009383534
Eyers, Tom. Speculative Formalism. Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv47w7b0
Gearhart, Suzanne. “Philosophy before Literature: Deconstruction, Historicity, and the Work of Paul de Man”. Diacritics 13, núm. 4 (1983): 63-81. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/464712
Harman, Graham. Quentin Meillassoux. Philosophy in the Making. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.
Jameson, Fredric R. “The Symbolic Inference; Or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis”. Critical Inquiry 4, núm. 3 (1978): 507-523. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/447950
Lehman, David. Signs of the Times. Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. New York: Poseidon Press, 1991.
Loesberg, Jonathan. “Paul de Man’s Aesthetic Ideology”. Diacritics 27, núm. 4 (1985): 87-108. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.1997.0033
Mirabile, Andrea. “Allegory, Pathos, and Irony: The Resistance to Benjamin in Paul de Man”. German Studies Review 35, núm. 2 (2012): 319-333. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2012.a478042
Meillassoux, Quentin. “Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the Sign Devoid of Meaning”. En Avanessian, Armen; Malik, Suhail, Genealogies of Speculation. Materialism and Subjectivity since Structuralism. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, 117-197.
Padui, Raoni. “Realism, Anti-Realism, and Materialism. Rereading the Critical Turn After Meillassoux”. Angelaki 16, núm. 2 (2011): 89-101. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2011.591589
Podlubne, J. “Visión ciega. El Roland Barthes de Paul de Man”. En Podlubne, Judith; De Man, Paul. Barthes en cuestión. Rosario: Bulk editores, Nube Negra, 2020, 7-42.
Podlubne, Judith; De Man, Paul. Barthes en cuestión. Rosario, Santiago: Nube Negra, Bulk Editores, 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.11144/Javeriana.cl23-47.prbs
Rorty, Richard. “Texts and Lumps”. New Literary History 17, núm. 1 (1985): 1-16. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/468973
Vélez, Fabio. Desfiguraciones: Ensayos sobre Paul de Man. Ciudad de México, Universidad Autónoma de México, 2016.
Warmiski, Andrej. “As the Poets Do It”. En Cohen, Tom; Cohen, Barbara; Hillis Miller, J.; Warminski, Andrej, Material Events. Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Pres, 2001, 3-31.
Warminski, Andrej. Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9780748681273
Woodward, Ashley. “Signifying Nothing: Nihilism, Information, and Signs”. Open Philosophy, núm. 6 (2023):1-15. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/opphil-2022-0239
Downloads
Published
Dimensions
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Metafísica y Persona

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors who have publications with this journal agree to the following terms:
a. Authors retain their copyright and grant the journal the right of first publication of their work, which is simultaneously subject to the Creative Commons Attribution License that allows third parties to share the work provided that its author and first publication in this journal are indicated.
b. Authors may adopt other non-exclusive licensing arrangements for distribution of the published version of the work (e.g. depositing it in an institutional telematic archive or publishing it in a monographic volume) provided that initial publication in this journal is indicated.
c. Authors are allowed and encouraged to disseminate their work via the Internet (e.g. in institutional telematics archives or on their website) before and during the submission process, which can lead to interesting exchanges and increase citations of the published work (see The Open Access Effect).

17.png)
