Book Description

This collection of essays serves as a forum for a broad spectrum of responses to the war-time writing of Paul de Man, responses rarely in agreement and often sharply contradictory, differing in approach, affect, and style. Responses engages in reading de Man’s early articles, in articulating their multiple contexts, then and now, and in opening the limitations imposed by rubrics like “the case of Paul de Man” and “deconstruction politics.” Responses brings together the readings and commentaries of literary critics and historians from the United States and Europe, with their diverse strategies—historical, rhetorical, psychological, political. The primary aims of these essays are reading de Man’s texts, from 1940 to 1983, and assessing them in their political, ideological, and institutional fields. Responses also provides essential historical materials—letters, documents, personal recollections—on Le Soir and Het Vlaamsche Land, on the occupation of Belgium, and on the biography of Paul de Man. An appendix collects the recent reactions of newspapers in the United States and Europe (France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Belgium, and elsewhere) to the discovery of de Man’s wartime writings. Contributors include Yves Bonnefoy, Cynthia Chase, Else de Bens, Ortwin de Graef, Jacques Derrida, Rodolphe Gasche, Gerald Graff, Barbara Johnson, Jeffrey Mehlman, J. Hillis Miller, Edward Said, Marc Shell, Gayatri Spivak, and others. The collection appears under the auspices of the Oxford Literary Review, England’s leading theoretical journal for over a decade.