Presenting the entire text of Nietzsche's lectures on rhetoric and language and his notes for them, as well as a translation of the German and of the Greek and Latin examples, this book fills an important gap in the philosopher's corpus unknown to many Nietzsche scholars.

Nietzsche and the philosopy of language have been a well trafficked crossroads for a generation, but almost always as a checkpoint for post-modernism and its critics. This work takes a historical approach to Nietzsche’s work on language, connecting it to his predecessors and contemporaries rather than his successors. Though Nietzsche invited identification with Zarathustra, the solitary wanderer ahead of his time, for most of his career he directly engaged the intellectual currents and scientific debates of his time. Emden situates Nietzsche’s writings on language and rhetoric within their wider historical context. He demonstrates that Nietzsche is not as radical in his thinking as has been often supposed, and that a number of problems with Nietzsche disappear when Nietzsche’s works are compared to works on the same subjects by writers of the 18th and 19th centuries. Further, the relevance of rhetoric and the history of rhetoric to philosophy and the history of philosophy is reasserted, in consonance with Nietzsche’s own statements and practices. Important in this regard are the role of fictions, descriptions, and metaphor.

Friedrich Nietzsche is among the most controversial and broadly interpreted figures in the history of contemporary theory. His work is remarkable for the manner in which it resists and disrupts the Western philosophical tradition, illuminating the ways that language creates, defines, and deforms our perspective of being in the world. Focusing on Nietzsche's masterful use of diverse rhetorical strategies and techniques, this book shows how coming to terms with Nietzsche's style is central to understanding his thought. What Nietzsche demands of his readers, Thomas proposes, is an interaction with his texts that goes beyond any surface level of meaning to the level of feeling, mood, and emotion. Examining a range of Nietzsche's writings, and culminating in a reading of THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY, the book explores how Nietzsche's provocative and playful use of language enables him not only to challenge accepted metaphysical truths, but also to reinvigorate rhetoric itself as an alternative means of generating meaning and value.

This important theoretical work by Paul de Man sets forth a mode of reading and interpretation based on exemplary texts by Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. The readings start from unresolved difficulties in the critical traditions engendered by these authors, and they return to the places in the text where those difficulties are most apparent or most incisively reflected upon. The close reading leads to the elaboration of a more general model of textual understanding, in which de Man shows that the thematic aspects of the texts--their assertions of truth or falsehood as well as their assertions of values--are linked to specific modes of figuration that can be identified and described. The description of synchronic figures of substitution leads, by an inner logic embedded in the structure of all tropes, to extended, narrative figures or allegories. De Man poses the question whether such self-generating systems of figuration can account fully for the intricacies of meaning and of signification they produce. Throughout the book, issues in contemporary criticism are addressed analytically rather than polemically. Traditional oppositions are put in question by a rhetorical analysis which demonstrates why literary texts are such powerful sources of meaning yet epistemologically so unreliable. Since the structure which underlies this tension belongs to language in general and is not confined to literary texts, the book, starting out as practical and historical criticism or as the demonstration of a theory of literary reading, leads into larger questions pertaining to the philosophy of language. "Through elaborate and elegant close readings of poems by Rilke, Proust's Remembrance, Nietzsche's philosophical writings and the major works of Rousseau, de Man concludes that all writing concerns itself with its own activity as language, and language, he says, is always unreliable, slippery, impossible....Literary narrative, because it must rely on language, tells the story of its own inability to tell a story....De Man demonstrates, beautifully and convincingly, that language turns back on itself, that rhetoric is untrustworthy."--Julia Epstein, Washington Post Book World "The study follows out of the thinking of Nietzsche and Genette (among others), yet moves in strikingly new directions....De Man's text, almost certain to be endlessly provocative, is worthy of repeated re-reading."--Ralph Flores, Library Journal "Paul de Man continues his work in the tradition of 'deconstructionist criticism, '... which] begins with the observation that all language is constructed; therefore the task of criticism is to deconstruct it and reveal what lies behind. The title of his new work reflects de Man's preoccupation with the unreliability of language. ... The contributions that the book makes, both in the initial theoretical chapters and in the detailed analyses (or deconstructions) of particular texts are undeniable."--Caroline D. Eckhardt, World Literature Today

Friedrich Nietzsche has emerged as one of the most important and influential modern philosophers. For several decades, the book series Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung (MTNF) has set the agenda in a rapidly growing and changing field of Nietzsche scholarship. The scope of the series is interdisciplinary and international in orientation reflects the entire spectrum of research on Nietzsche, from philosophy to literary studies and political theory. The series publishes monographs and edited volumes that undergo a strict peer-review process. The book series is led by an international team of editors, whose work represents the full range of current Nietzsche scholarship.

New readings and perspectives on Nietzsche's work are brought together in this collection of essays by prominent scholars from North America and Europe. They question whether Nietzsche's work and the conventional interpretation of it is rhetorical and nihilistic.