Rhetoric and Death examines the materialist conception of death that arose in the 20th century in terms of contemporary discourse theory in literary criticism, linguistics and post structuralism. In doing so Ronald Schleifer redefines Modernism and its relationship with Postmodernism.
The material surface of Modernist writing, the author asserts, resonates with the fact of nonsense and the dread of death – as in “The Wasteland” where Eliot offers the figure of “the third who walks always beside you” but who cannot be focused upon. Schleifer shows that the rejection of the notion of death as a transcendental event at the end of life transforms the function of rhetoric: rather than creating “depths” of meaning, rhetoric function to articulate the play of sense and non-sense.
This is an extremely distinguished book, a superb example of what is almost a new genre of scholarly and critical books. The author moves with remarkable ease from Freud to Benjamin, to De Man to Barthes, to Joyce to Yeats to Stevens, stopping along the way to dozen other authors. The upshot is an argument of original valance of what is essential and distinctive in these modernist authors, namely a materialist view of language and death. Enjoyable and impassioned.
