DE MAN, PAUL

born Dec. 6, 1919, Antwerp, Belg. died Dec. 21, 1983, New Haven, Conn., U.S. Belgian-born literary critic, one of the major proponents of the critical theory known as deconstruction. De Man graduated from the University of Brussels in 1942. He worked as a writer and translator until 1947, when he immigrated to the United States. After attending Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (M.A., 1958; Ph.D., 1960), he taught at Harvard, Cornell (Ithaca, New York), and Johns Hopkins (Baltimore, Maryland) universities. In 1970 he joined the faculty at Yale University, New Haven, where he remained until his death. While at Yale, de Man wrote his groundbreaking book Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (1971). The essays contained in the book give de Man's deconstructive readings of works as well as his analysis of commentary on literature written by other philosophers, as in Heidegger's Exigesis of Hlderlin. With the publication of de Man's book, Yale became the centre for deconstructive literary criticism in the United States. De Man's later works include Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (1979) and The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984). His works on the theory of deconstruction include The Resistance to Theory (1986; written with Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller) and Aesthetic Ideology (1988). De Man's involvement from 1940 to 1942 with Le Soir, a Belgian pro-Nazi newspaper, was revealed in the late 1980s. Writings from the newspaper, including one overtly anti-Semitic essay, were collected and published under the title Wartime Journalism, 19391943 (1988).