DeMan’s ascetic view links Romanticism to modernism through continuity rather than rupture.

Evidence

This is also the point at which his work can be seen crucially to intersect with the current debate over modernism and Postmodernism, terms of which he would not particularly have approved, especially in the periodizing fashion in which I plan to use them. If we drew up the battle lines between those committed to positing some deep continuity between Romanticism and modernism and those intent on stressing a radical break between them, DeMan would surely have belonged in the first camp, even though the radical difference of the individual text (or rather the individual auteur, for DeMan remains committed to auteur theory even in the problematization of authorship as such) intervenes to discredit the larger concepts. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 552

Categorization

• DEFINE: Positions DeMan’s ‘ascetic imperative’ — his vocabulary of temptation and seduction around language — as central to his philosophical view, and maps his camp in the modernist/postmodernist continuity-vs-break debate.
• XREF: Connects to Jameson’s broader project of periodizing modernism vs postmodernism — the reader’s core task of distinguishing parody/pastiche and periodizing aesthetic form.