Paul de Man
Paul de Man (December 6, 1919 in Antwerp, † December 21 1983 in New Haven ) was a native of Belgium literary theorist, critic and philosopher.
As a student wandered the native Flame 1952 to the United States and earned his doctorate at Harvard with a thesis on Mallarmé and Yeats. From 1960 to 1966 he taught at Cornell University; 1967-1970 in Zurich and at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In 1970 he was called to Yale, where he worked until his death as professor of comparative literature.
Theory
De Man is the leading representative of the so-called Yale Critics.
In the center of his interest was the immanent contradictions of literary texts, based on the fact that they are both rhetorical and logical nature. A text says something, will provide knowledge, informing customers etc. - that is its logical aspect. To achieve this, he has to but funds operate, which has a certain inherent persuasiveness, ie primarily rhetorical figures. It is de Man's often repeated claim that this double character inevitably amounts to a self-destruction of the text because its rhetorical content of the logic behind drives. Most of his interpretations - particularly the romantic literature - come to the conclusion that the linguistic means by which a text makes use of, statements just the opposite of what the text wants to convey logical - this is the dialectic of blindness and insight ( " Blindness and Insight ", New York 1971). Since the language of logical objects can always composed only of rhetorical functions, they always concealed from the object they want to show.
An exception applies only to the literary text. Since such texts are from the outset about their rhetoricity aware, know the means by which they work, they have regard to the resistiveness of voice over logical truth an advantage. Literature has just the blindness ' on the subject and therefore can undermine aware. Literary texts have the ability to demonstrate to yourself how language can obscure the reality. By using a text showing off that he can not be subjected to unique reading, he is himself a allegory of reading '. Since the attempt to interpret texts, is itself merely a rhetorical function of the texts, provoked the attempt to define a rhetorical figure on unambiguous meaning at most a " misreading ". Only a deconstructive reading that recognizes the leseallegorischen character of the texts, can be a way out here. Examples here include analyzes of texts by Nietzsche, Rilke, Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Rousseau, Proust, Baudelaire, Shelley, Wordsworth, Walter Benjamin, TS Eliot, and Kleist.
De Man's mode of linguistic criticism is mentally deconstruction Derrida, who was friendly terms with him, and poststructuralism close, but opposition to postmodernism, insofar as his theory denies the historicity of texts. Methodological approach can be understood as a radicalization of structuralist approaches, which relates to methods of early Russian formalism.
Criticism
After 1987 de Man's collaboration in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir and Het collaboration Vlaamsche land had been uncovered, criticism of the person as the work was massively loud. This collaboration on nazi loyal Magazines starts after de Man's failed attempt to flee from the Nazis to Spain in late 1940 and will last until the end of 1941. The anti-Semitic tendency of these products is unique, especially in the article of March 4, 1941 Les Juifs dans la littérature actuelle ( "The Jews in the current literature "). The Jews had, despite all efforts have failed to corrupt the European literature; they continue to stay "healthy". The résumé of the article is that against an "isolated Jewish colony " outside Europe, from literary point of objections was no good. The discovery of this article four years after de Man's death led together with the previously collected throw his theory to prefer political Inaktivismus to a devaluation of his work in academic discourse. Meanwhile, evidence was tried that several other articles of the time quite positively deal with such as the Dreyfus defender Charles Peguy and despised by the Nazis, the French Surrealists.