Egan,+Anthony

=**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//." -Blindness and Insight

Paul De Man (December 6, 1919 to December 21, 1983) was a Deconstruction Theorist born in Belgium. He was a good friend of Jacques Derrida, and espoused many of the same beliefs that he did. De Man believed that literature had no real meaning; anyone who saw meaning was simply putting their own meaning into the text. Whether this is good or bad is irrelevant. It simply is.

De Man Himself
Paul De Man was born on December 6, 1919 in Antwerp, Belgium, to a high-class family. He studied at the Free University of Brussels, where he did some minor work for student magazines. In 1940, the Germans occupied Brussels; De man and his wife fled the Germans, but were caught in Spain and sent back to Brussels. In 1941, he got a job from his Uncle working on the biggest newspaper in Belgium, //Le Soir//, which at the time was controlled by the Germans. Until November of 1942, De Man wrote for //Le Soir vole,// as it was known at the time, copiously. He claims to have left the paper to protest German control, yet the Germans already controlled the paper when he started working there. He believed that having the Germans there wasn't necessarily a bad thing -- the Germans weren't really cruel to the Belgians, at least, until 1942 when De Man left. In 1948, after the war, he moved to America, leaving his first wife behind, since she did not have a visa. He went to teach at Bard College in New York, where he met his second wife, whom he married technically before he divorced his first wife. He then jumped from various schools such as Harvard, Berlitz, Cornell, Zurich, and Johns Hopkins, finally ending up at Yale, where he taught until he died in 1984. He was lauded as a fantastic teacher, especially at Yale, "where, throughout the Seventies and early Eighties, he was the most celebrated member of the world’s most celebrated literature school."

His first book, //Blindness and Insight//, first came up in 1971, when he was 51, and he only wrote it because Yale insisted that professors needed to be published. He wrote many, many essays, and published very few when he was alive; many of his essays were put into collections posthumously, and there may be many more essays that may be waiting to be found. De Man did not want to be published. When he died, his friends and family decided to post all of what they could find of his writings and teachings for the world to see, because they considered his thoughts to be influential and important; he easily wrote over 150 articles spanning the 1940's alone.

**De Man and His Views on Jews**
De Man wrote for //Le Soir// for almost two years under German control. Some of his work was particularly anti-Semitic, most notably //Jews in Contemporary Literature//, in which he demonizes Jews for essentially destroying European art. He stated that, "... a novel born in this atmosphere would merit, up to a certain point, the qualification of //enjuive."// Enjuive, in French, means Jew-ridden, as in, riddled with Jews. This may or may not be a bad thing, but De Man believes this is a bad thing, since Jews have "played an important role in the artificial and disordered existence of Europe since 1920." (127) This essay, among others, are strong evidence that De Man held anti-Semitic viewpoints, at least in the early 1940's.

Jacques Derrida, his close friend and another deconstructionist theorist, who is also a Jew, was deeply offended by De Man's article. Yet he defended his friend up to a point, stating that his vulgar anti-Semitism, is meant "...to condemn anti-semitism itself //inasmuch as// it is vulgar, always and essentially vulgar." De Man is mostly remembered for these anti-Semitic works and beliefs, with some people on his side, acknowledging his remarks for the vulgarity that they are, but excusing him because of his other works and his pronounced ideas and beliefs; still others decry him for his crude remarks and papers and refuse to listen to anything he may have to say.

**De Man's Work**
//Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust,// 1979 //Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism// (2nd ed.) 1983 //The Rhetoric of Romanticism// 1984 (His Final Work) //The Resistance to Theory// 1986 //Wartime Journalism, 1934–1943,// 1988 //Critical Writings: 1953-1978// 1989 //Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminar and Other Papers// 1993 //Aesthetic Ideology// 1996

Research Pertaining De Man
[] De Man, Paul, //Blindness and insight: essays in the rhetoric of contemporary criticism// De Man, Paul, //Jews in Contemporary Literature//