Paul de Man Biography Quotes 9 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Paul de Man was born in Belgium in 1919 and came of age in a multilingual, intellectually charged environment. He studied at the Universite libre de Bruxelles, where he began to cultivate the philological and philosophical interests that later defined his criticism. Family and political context mattered. His uncle, Henri de Man, was one of the most prominent Belgian socialist theorists of the early twentieth century, a figure whose controversial intellectual and political career formed part of the atmosphere in which the younger de Man learned to navigate ideas, ideologies, and the public responsibilities of intellectual work. The young scholar moved with unusual ease among French, Dutch, German, and English languages, a facility that would later support his close readings of European and American literature. Even before academic appointments, he wrote criticism and book journalism, exploring the rhetorical structures that he felt animated literary texts beyond their stated themes.

Wartime Journalism and Its Afterlife
During the German occupation of Belgium, de Man contributed cultural journalism to newspapers in Brussels. Among these writings was an article that adopted anti-Jewish stereotypes and endorsed exclusionary policies. Decades after his death, this material was rediscovered in Belgian archives and published, igniting a major, international controversy. The discovery inserted his wartime record into the center of debates about ethics, memory, and the responsibilities of critical theory. For admirers and critics alike, the episode became inseparable from assessments of his later philosophical positions, and it compelled colleagues and students to confront the tension between deconstructive reading practices and historical accountability.

Emigration and Teaching in the United States
After the war, de Man emigrated to the United States and began to teach in American colleges and universities. He held appointments at institutions including Bard College, Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University, and, finally, Yale University. The path was neither linear nor easy; he worked outside the most obvious channels of academic advancement and built his reputation through essays, lectures, and seminars rather than through conventional disciplinary credentials. In the classroom, he was known for an exacting, often austere manner that refused paraphrase in favor of close attention to grammar, trope, and the figurative logic of texts. Generations of students encountered a mode of reading that dismantled stable hierarchies between literal and figurative meaning and invited them to see how literary works could turn against their own avowed intentions.

Yale and the Circle of Deconstruction
At Yale, de Man became a central figure among the group sometimes called the Yale Critics, alongside Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, and Harold Bloom. Their differences were real, but they shared a commitment to rigorous interpretation and the autonomy of textual form. De Man also developed a deep intellectual friendship with Jacques Derrida, whose visits to American campuses, including the landmark 1966 gathering at Johns Hopkins, helped to reshape the study of literature and philosophy in the United States. Their exchanges about rhetoric, metaphor, and the instability of meaning became touchstones for many readers of both men. Shoshana Felman and Barbara Johnson also participated in this milieu, contributing to the translation, dissemination, and elaboration of deconstructive practices that circulated between New Haven, Baltimore, and New York.

Ideas, Methods, and Major Works
De Man specialized in a form of rhetorical reading that treated literature not as a transparent vehicle for ideas but as a complex system of figures. He argued that critics tend to be blind to the rhetorical procedures that make their insights possible, a paradox he famously explored in the essays collected in Blindness and Insight. His readings of Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, Keats, Wordsworth, and Yeats emphasized how tropes such as allegory, prosopopoeia, and irony shape what texts can claim to know about themselves. Allegories of Reading extended these concerns by showing how philosophical and literary works alike generate interpretations that they cannot fully control. In The Rhetoric of Temporality, he drew a sharp distinction between symbol and allegory, aligning allegory with a self-dividing, temporal logic that resists the reconciliations often sought by Romantic aesthetics. Late in his career, he gathered essays under the title The Resistance to Theory, a phrase that named a pervasive reluctance to acknowledge the theoretical preconditions of reading. Posthumous volumes, including The Rhetoric of Romanticism and later editorial projects, confirmed the breadth of his archive and the consistency of his attention to figural language.

Colleagues, Debates, and Institutional Life
The debates around de Man were as much institutional as they were conceptual. With Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller, he helped shape a curriculum that put continental philosophy into conversation with Anglo-American criticism. Harold Bloom often differed from de Man on the relation between influence, voice, and meaning, yet their juxtaposition at Yale made the university a magnet for students seeking strong, competing models of interpretation. Jacques Derrida, frequently in dialogue with de Man, amplified these controversies in seminars and essays, while visitors and interlocutors such as Roland Barthes and Roman Jakobson provided further contexts for a transatlantic itinerary of structuralism and its aftermath. The circulation of these figures through conferences and classrooms changed how departments understood the task of literary study.

Posthumous Revelations and the Ethics of Reading
De Man died in 1983 in the United States. Several years later, the revelation of his wartime journalism triggered a wave of public scrutiny. Colleagues including Derrida, Miller, and Hartman addressed the documents in essays that sought to disentangle biography from method, arguing in different ways that deconstructive reading provided resources for confronting rather than evading uncomfortable history. Other commentators rejected that position, insisting that the ethical implications of the wartime texts could not be bracketed from his later work. Journalists, historians, and critics produced books and dossiers that examined his early life, his emigration, and the conditions of the occupied press. The debate became a landmark case in the broader culture wars over theory, compelling literary studies to articulate how hermeneutics relates to moral judgment.

Legacy
Paul de Man left a body of writing that continues to shape the study of literature, rhetoric, and philosophy. His influence is visible not only in the work of close colleagues such as Derrida, Hartman, Miller, and Bloom, but also in the teaching practices of many who encountered his seminars and carried them into classrooms across North America and Europe. His emphasis on the priority of rhetoric over theme remains a provocation: it challenges readers to register the instability of the terms that seem most secure and to recognize how interpretation is implicated in the figures it deploys. At the same time, the moral questions raised by his wartime texts have indelibly marked his reception, ensuring that his name stands at the crossroads of methodological innovation and historical responsibility. For better and for worse, the story of his career traces the fortunes of theory in the late twentieth century: its intellectual power, its institutional reach, and the ethical demands that accompany its practice.

Our collection contains 9 quotes who is written by Paul, under the main topics: Truth - Writing - Deep - Art - Mortality.