Paul de Man begins with an opposition between allegory and irony.
Allegory is a naïve or unreflected attitude to language. We think that there is a real world and that our language is then a sign of that world. Irony, by contrast, shows that the supposed ‘nature’ that precedes the sign. The self that we supposedly lost is produced through the poem; the poem creates or institutes the division between self and sign. However, any idea that the ironic poem could overcome allegory – or a division between sign and self – is itself naïve.
Any explanation of irony is itself a narrative, is itself always caught up in allegory.
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