Revisiting A New History of French Literature

R.J. Golsan: A New History of French Literature was published in 1989, when the effects of the de Man and Heidegger affairs were challenging not only the prevailing critical formalism, but were paving the way for a more ideological or “engaged” criticism in the 1990s (postcolonialism, gender studies, etc). If you were to undertake or even reconceive your New History, what impact, if any, would these developments have?

Denis Hollier: Contrary to a commonly held American assumption, de Man has never been a key figure in the genealogy of French literary studies, not in this country, and even less so in France. Before moving to the States in the early seventies, I read a few articles by him, like the one in the special issue of Critique devoted to Blanchot, and another one about Montaigne, but that was almost by chance. He was really not a very important reference—his name was never mentioned by students, and to my knowledge that’s still the case. There is still not much de Man translated into French, and the pieces of literary criticism coming from France that I read do not quote him very often, to say the least. De Man for me became a reference when I moved to the States, yet even there he did not really have a central influence in French departments, but more in adjacent fields, especially in Comparative Literature. In any case, the “crisis” prompted by the discovery and dissemination of de Man’s wartime articles was really not central to the way the book was conceived.