In Anglo-American criticism, the most powerful and influential exponent of that particular
practice and theorization of reading designated by the term'deconstruction'has been Paul de
Man. For de Man, the work of reading is inescapably a work of theorization. In Allegories of
Reading (1979), de Man suggests that reading is itself theorized in and by literary and other
texts so as to produce repetitions, in reading, of the text's figurations of reading. The chapter
reprinted below, from The Resistance to Theory, is extracted from an essay in which de Man …

This essay was not originally intended to address the question of teaching directly, although
it was supposed to have a didactic and an educational function-which it failed to achieve. It
was written at the request of the Committee on the Research Activities of the Modern
Language Association as a contribution to a collective volume entitled Introduction to
Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures. I was asked to write the section on
literary theory. Such essays are expected to follow a clearly determined program: they are …