Paul de Man (December 6, 1919, Antwerp – December 21, 1983, New Haven, Connecticut) was a Belgian-born deconstructionist literary critic and theorist.
He began teaching at Bard College. Later, he completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in the late 1950s. He then taught at Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Zurich, before ending up on the faculty in French and Comparative Literature at Yale University, where he was considered part of the Yale School of deconstruction. At the time of his death from cancer, he was Sterling Professor of the Humanities and chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale. De Man oversaw the dissertations of Gayatri Spivak (at Cornell), Barbara Johnson (at Yale), Samuel Weber (at Cornell), and many other noted scholars.
After his death, the discovery of some two hundred articles he wrote during World War II for collaborationist newspapers, including one explicitly anti-Semitic, caused a scandal and provoked a reconsideration of his life and work.
Read more about Paul De Man: Academic Work, Influence and Legacy, Wartime Journalism and Anti-Semitic Writing, Posthumous Controversy, Works, Selected Secondary Works
Famous quotes containing the words paul and/or man:
“Martha, your father told me something once, a long time ago, when I first started to work with him: In the war of science, many people must die before any victory can be won.”
—Robert D. Andrews, and Nick Grindé. Dr. Paul Ames (Bruce Bennett)
“It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even in this age and in this new country, a value more permanent and universal than that of gold. After all our discoveries and inventions no man will go by a pile of wood. It is as precious to us as it was to our Saxon and Norman ancestors. If they made their bows of it, we make our gun-stocks of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)