Paul de Man

Paul de Man (1919–1983) was a Belgian-born literary theorist whose work examined rhetoric, reading, and the instability of meaning. His posthumously exposed wartime journalism, including antisemitic writing, profoundly shaped debates about his legacy.

Rhetoric: The study and practice of language used to persuade, move, or shape understanding. De Man treated rhetoric as a force that can disrupt a text’s apparent meaning.
Allegory of reading: A critical account of reading in which texts expose the instability of their own meanings. De Man used this idea to describe texts whose rhetoric unsettles their apparent statements.
Leuven: A city in Belgium and the historic seat of the Catholic University of Leuven. De Man studied at the university there before leaving Belgium during the Second World War.
Jacques Derrida: A French philosopher whose work developed deconstruction and transformed twentieth-century humanities scholarship. Derrida became a close intellectual ally and wrote extensively about de Man after his death.
Yale School: A group of influential literary critics associated with Yale University and deconstructive criticism. De Man was a leading figure in this group, which brought his methods to prominence.
Deconstruction: A mode of textual analysis that examines tensions and assumptions within concepts and arguments. De Man became a central literary theorist associated with deconstructive reading.
Irony: A figure or mode in which meaning diverges from a speaker’s or text’s apparent statement. His account of irony emphasizes an unbridgeable gap between linguistic sign and intended meaning.
World War II: A global conflict fought from 1939 to 1945 between the Allied and Axis powers. The occupation of Belgium formed the setting for de Man’s early journalism.
Geoffrey Hartman: A literary critic known for work on Romanticism, interpretation, and the Yale School. Hartman was a Yale colleague who helped establish de Man’s influence in literary studies.
The New York Times: An American newspaper founded in 1851 and published internationally. Its 1987 report revealed de Man’s wartime articles to a broad public and triggered controversy.

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Gayatri Chakravorty SpivakRelated: He supervised Spivak’s doctoral dissertation on W. B. Yeats.