Paul De Man
Paul de Man 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 at Yale. 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. De Man oversaw the dissertations of both Gayatri Spivak and Barbara Johnson.
“Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.”
“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.”
“...asked by his wife whether he wants to have his bowling shoes laced over or laced under, Archie Bunker answers the question: "What's the difference?" Being a reader of sublime simplicity, his wife replies by patiently explaining the difference between lacing over and lacing under, whatever this may be, but provokes only ire. "What's the difference" did not ask for difference but means instead "I don't give a damn what the difference is.”