Texts and Contexts Series

A polymath well versed in European literature and philosophy, one of the founders of deconstruction, and a widely respected teacher, Paul de Man brought unprecedented attention and acclaim to the so-called Yale Critics. His fame was at a zenith when he died suddenly in 1983. A few years later, Ortwin de Graef found the de Man had written for the collaborationist press during the Nazi occupation, a discovery that ignited an international reassessment of de Man's work.

Serenity in Crisis is the first sustained account of the complex, intertextual tradition in which de Man wrote and of the persistent concerns expressed in his early work. It reconstructs the truth-models with which de Man justified his political choice before and during the occupation and traces them back to an ambitious intention to integrate the competing truths of the natural sciences, the social sciences, and literature. The significance of de Man's ideational framework and the decisions that followed from it have extended well beyond the disasters of World War II. De Graef clearly illuminates and critiques the abstruse paths of logic in de Man's early writings as well as in the reformulations of de Man's thought expressed in his writings of the 1950s.

Titanic Light

by Ortwin de Graef

Published 1 March 1995

Notoriety struck the Belgian-born literary critic Paul de Man more than once. First came his fame as one of the principal-and most controversial-theorists of deconstruction in the 1970s and early 1980s. After his death in 1983, notoriety struck a second time. In 1987, a Belgian scholar discovered that de Man had written in the early 1940s for several journals that collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation of Belgium. The revelations precipitated debates that have yet to subside. The scholar who set loose this furor was Ortwin de Graef, who has since embarked on a comprehensive survey of de Man's writings. The first book, Serenity in Crisis, covered de Man's career from 1939 to 1960. Titanic Light examines de Man's work from the 1960s. Titanic Light concentrates on de Man's increased interest during the 1960s in Romantic (and post-Romantic) literature and criticism. De Graef follows in detail de Man's strong readings of the works of Hoelderlin, Rousseau, and Wordsworth. He connects de Man's interpretations of these and other writers with his earlier critical works and his later deconstructive writings. In addition, de Graef places de Man's essays from the 1960s (some later collected in the influential volume Blindness and Insight) in the context of the critical debates of that era-debates about structuralism, Marxism, phenomenology, American New Criticism, and other critical schools. The result is a penetrating portrait of a critic who, during the sixties, reached full maturity as an interpreter of literature and contemporary criticism. Combining sympathy and skepticism for its subject, Titanic Light continues what is already the most insightful, thorough, and balanced examination of de Man's intellectual career.