Paul De Man
Paul De Man
Full Name and Common Aliases
Paul de Man was born Jean-Pierre Walter Emanuel Glücksman on June 6, 1919, in Antwerp, Belgium. He is commonly known as Paul de Man.
Birth and Death Dates
June 6, 1919 – December 21, 1983
Nationality and Profession(s)
De Man was a Belgian-born literary critic, philosopher, and scholar of Germanic studies. His work spanned multiple disciplines, including literature, philosophy, and linguistics.
Early Life and Background
Born to a Jewish family in Antwerp, Belgium, de Man grew up in a multilingual household where he was exposed to Dutch, French, English, and German from an early age. His family's cultural background and linguistic diversity would later influence his academic pursuits. After the Nazi occupation of Belgium during World War II, de Man fled to France to escape persecution as a Jew.
Major Accomplishments
De Man's academic career was marked by significant contributions to literary theory, particularly in the fields of phenomenology, structuralism, and deconstruction. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1958 and went on to teach at various institutions, including Harvard, Yale, and Johns Hopkins universities.
Notable Works or Actions
De Man's most notable works include:
Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (1971), which explores the relationship between language, literature, and politics
The Resistance to Theory (1986), a collection of essays that critiques the limitations of literary theory
Impact and Legacy
De Man's work had a profound impact on 20th-century literary theory. His critique of romanticism and his emphasis on the importance of rhetoric in understanding literature influenced scholars such as Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, and Hayden White.
Why They Are Widely Quoted or Remembered
Paul de Man is widely quoted for his insightful critiques of literature and politics. His work continues to influence contemporary thought on issues like ideology, language, and the role of the critic in society.
Quotes by Paul De Man
Prior to any generalization about literature, literary texts have to be read, and the possibility of reading can never be taken for granted. It is an act of understanding that can never be observed, nor in any way prescribed or verified.
Literature involves the voiding, rather than the affirmation, of aesthetic categories.
The writer’s language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.
And to read is to understand, to question, to know, to forget, to erase, to deface, to repeat – that is to say, the endless prosopopoeia by which the dead are made to have a face and a voice which tells the allegory of their demise and allows us to apostrophize them in our turn. No degree of knowledge can ever stop this madness, for it is the madness of words.
What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism.
The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear – and even, in certain respects, would be – the most modern of critical movements.
The bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.
Literature... is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most reliable of terms in which man names and transforms himself.