Paul de Man Quotes

Paul de Man — Belgian Critic born on December 06, 1919, died on December 21, 1983

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 in any textual, literary, or critical activity. This approach aroused considerable opposition, which de Man attributed to "resistance" inherent in the difficult enterprise of literary interpretation itself... (wikipedia)

Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.

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.

Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.

Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.

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.