Paul de Man
Paul de Man was a Belgian-born literary critic and theorist, born on December 6, 1919, in Antwerp. He studied science and philosophy at the University of Brussels during the Nazi occupation, a time during which he wrote for a Nazi-affiliated newspaper, producing content that included anti-Semitic views. After emigrating to the United States in 1947 with his family, de Man pursued advanced studies in comparative literature at Harvard University, earning both his M.A. and Ph.D. He held academic positions at several prestigious institutions, including Bard College, Cornell University, and Yale University, where he became known for his work on Romantic poetry and his development of deconstructionism—a critical theory that challenges the idea of fixed meaning in texts. De Man's influential essays, such as "Semiology and Rhetoric" and "Blindness and Insight," explored the complexities of language and rhetoric in literature. Following his death in 1983, his legacy became controversial due to revelations about his past writings during the war, which led to debates about his contributions to critical theory and the implications of his earlier beliefs. Despite the controversy, his role in shaping modern literary criticism remains significant.
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Paul de Man
- Born: December 6, 1919
- Birthplace: Antwerp, Belgium
- Died: December 21, 1983
- Place of death: New Haven, Connecticut
Biography
Paul de Man began life on December 6, 1919, in Antwerp, Belgium. His father, Robert de Man, was a manufacturer; his mother was the former Madeleine de Brey. An uncle, Hendrik de Man, served as leader of the Labor party in Belgium in the 1940’s. Young de Man studied science and philosophy at the University of Brussels from 1939 to 1942. As a university student living under Nazi occupation, he wrote for a Nazi newspaper from 1940 to 1942. One of his articles from this period, “Jews in Contemporary Literature,” is decidedly anti-Semitic. Also during World War II, he produced a literary endeavor of a completely different sort: a translation into Dutch of Herman Melville’s immortal novel, Moby Dick.
In 1943 de Man married Anaide Baragian, the mother of his first three children; in 1947 the family emigrated to the United States. His first academic appointment was at Bard College in 1949, where he taught French literature. Meanwhile he began graduate study, earning his M.A. in comparative literature at Harvard University in 1958 and a Ph.D. at the same institution in 1960. By his second wife, Patricia, whom he married in 1950, he had two more children.
Upon completing his doctoral studies, de Man taught successively at Cornell University (1960-1967), John Hopkins University (1967-1970), and Yale University (1970-1983), where his specialties were literary criticism and literary theory. He earned a reputation as a critic of the Romantic poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and like many critics interested in the Romantics, he reacted against the dominant New Criticism of the 1960’s, which often tended to disparage Romantics. He developed a variation on the theory of criticism, usually attributed to Jacques Derrida and known as deconstructionism, which assailed what its proponents saw as the New Critics’s unwarranted confidence in their ability to extract the meaning from literary texts by close analysis. Because of the imprecision inherent in language itself, the deconstructionists argued, the meaning of a literary text can never be certain; rather, the supposed “meaning” of a text is in considerable measure a function of the interpreter’s art. For de Man, language is inescapably rhetorical, and rhetorical devices are ultimately mystifying. Literary texts, being rhetorically more complex and sophisticated than ordinary language, are more mystifying than mere conversation, which can be elusive enough. Therefore it is impossible to know with confidence what a text is really intending to say. Paul de Man set forth his version of deconstruction in articles such as “Semiology and Rhetoric” in the journal Diacritics in 1973, and in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (1971, revised 1983).
When Paul de Man died of cancer on December 21, 1983, he had become a much-respected figure in the academic world. In 1987, however, evidence of his “Nazi period” was uncovered by a journalist, and this discovery clouded his reputation. Many of his former colleagues and students in American universities, never having detected evidence of Nazi ideology generally or anti-Semitism, defended his memory. Whatever the truth of the allegations against him, his contribution to critical theory stands as an impressive achievement.