Paul DeMan. Follow. Something went wrong. Please try your request again later. ALL RIGHT. Blindness and insight · Essays on the rhetoric of contemporary criticism First edition. by Paul De Man Author 5. Summary. This essay examines how Virginia Woolf's personal and social anti-Semitism disrupts the creation of a stable ethos in her political treatise, Three Guineas. The article uses De Man's concept of blindness and insight to interrogate Woolf's own ideological blindness and presents liminality as a framework within which to understand the ethos of this work. When Paul de Man published Blindness and Insight, it was his first foray into America to deal with literary criticism. For a first attempt, it was a resounding success: Yale graduate students, easily impressed, saw it as a classic in the then-burgeoning field of deconstruction. The book contained essays on a variety of topics. BLINDNESS AND PERSPECTIVE: ESSAYS IN THE RHETORIC OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM. By Paul de Man. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971, 1983 2nd rev. ed. p.