born Dec. 6, 1919, Antwerp, Belg.
died Dec. 21, 1983, New Haven, Conn., U.S.
Belgian-born U.S. literary critic.
He immigrated to the U.S. in 1947, attended Harvard University, and in 1970 joined the faculty at Yale University, where he remained the rest of his life. His groundbreaking Blindness and Insight (1971) made Yale the American centre for deconstructive literary criticism (see deconstruction ). His other works include Allegories of Reading (1979), The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984), and Aesthetic Ideology (1988). His reputation was undermined with the posthumous revelation of his wartime anti-Semitic writings for the pro-Nazi Belgian newspaper Le Soir .