Paul de Man
Paul de Man
Paul de Man, born Paul Adolph Michel Deman, was a Belgian-born literary critic and literary theorist. At the time of his death, de Man was one of the most prominent literary critics in the United States—known particularly for his importation of German and French philosophical approaches into Anglo-American literary studies and critical theory. Along with Jacques Derrida, he was part of an influential critical movement that went beyond traditional interpretation of literary texts to reflect on the epistemological difficulties inherent...
NationalityBelgian
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth6 December 1919
CountryBelgium
The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements.
Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.
The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.
Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.
Fashion is like the ashes left behind by the uniquely shaped flames of the fire, the trace alone revealing that a fire actually took place.
What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism
Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.
The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.
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.
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.
Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.
The bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.
Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.
If one reads too quickly or too slowly, one understands nothing.