In occupied Belgium during World War II, Paul de Man (1919-1983) wrote music, lecture, and exhibition reviews, a regular book column, interviews, and articles on cultural politics for the Brussels daily newspaper Le Soir. From December 1940 until he resigned in November 1942, de Man contributed almost 200 articles to this and another newspaper, both then controlled by Nazi sympathizers and vocal advocates of the "new order." Later to become one of the most respected and influential literary theorists in America, de Man, then 21 and 22 years old, wrote primarily as the chief literary critic for Le Soir. His weekly column reviewed the latest novels and poetry from Belgium, France, Germany, and England. De Man commented extensively on major propaganda expositions, and interviewed leading writers and cultural figures, including Paul Valery and the future Vichy Education minister Abel Bonnard. The political extremes of de Man's wartime writing are marked by two articles. His single anti-Semitic article, "Les Juifs dans la litterature actuelle" (4 March 1941), acquiesces in the deportation of Jews to "a Jewish colony isolated from Europe." But de Man later argued in defense of a Resistance-linked journal ("A propos de la revue Messages," 14 July 1942) against the "totalitarian" censors' "unconsidered attacks." This volume reprints in facsimile all of de Man's articles in Le Soir as well as three articles he wrote prior to the occupation in 1940 as editor of the liberal Cahiers du Libre Examen. It also includes English translations of the ten articles written in Flemmish for the Antwerp paper Het Vlaamsche Land, in March-October 1942. The collection appears under the auspices of the Oxford Literary Review, England's leading theoretical journal for over a decade.

This is the first book to provide a sustained critical analysis of the literary-aesthetic dimension of French fascism--the peculiarly French form of what Walter Benjamin called the fascist "aestheticizing of politics." Focusing first on three important extremist nationalist writers at the turn of the century and then on five of the most visible fascist intellectuals in France in the 1930s, David Carroll shows how both traditional and modern concepts of art figure in the elaboration of fascist ideology--and in the presentation of fascism as an art of the political. Carroll is concerned with the internal relations of fascism and literature--how literary fascists conceived of politics as a technique for fashioning a unified people and transforming the disparate elements of society into an organic, totalized work of art. He explores the logic of such aestheticizing, as well as the assumptions about art, literature, and culture at the basis of both the aesthetics and politics of French literary fascists. His book reveals how not only classical humanism but also modern aesthetics that defend the autonomy and integrity of literature became models for xenophobic forms of nationalism and extreme "cultural" forms of anti-Semitism. A cogent analysis of the ideological function of literature and culture in fascism, this work helps us see the ramifications of thinking of literature or art as the truth or essence of politics.

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A landmark biography that reveals the secret past of one of the most influential academics of the twentieth century. Over thirty years after his death in 1983, Paul de Man, a hugely charismatic intellectual who created with deconstruction an ideology so pervasive that it threatened to topple the very foundations of literature, remains a haunting and still largely unexamined figure. Deeply influential, de Man and his theory-driven philosophy were so dominant that his passing received front-page coverage, suggesting that a cult hero, if not intellectual rock star, had met an untimely end. Yet in 1988, de Man's reputation was ruined when it was discovered that he had written an anti-Semitic article and worked for a collaborating Belgium newspaper during World War II. Who was he, really, and who had he been? No one knew. Still in shock, few of his followers wanted to find out. Once an admirer, although never a theorist, the biographer Evelyn Barish began her own investigation. Relying on years of original archival work and interviews with over two hundred of de Man's circle of friends and family, most of them now dead, Barish vividly re-creates this collaborationist world of occupied Belgian and France. Born in 1919 to a rich but tragically unstable family, Paul de Man, a golden boy, was influenced by his uncle Henri de Man, a socialist turned Nazi collaborator who became the de facto Belgian prime minister. By the early 1940s, Paul, while seemingly only a reviewer for Nazi newspapers, was secretly rising in far more important jobs in Belgium's and France’s collaborationist regimes. Postwar, barred from the university, de Man created a publishing house, but stole all its assets; then, facing jail, he fled to New York, abandoning his family (his opportunistic, anti-Semitic writing seemed the least of his crimes). Arriving penniless, he quickly rose again, befriending an entire generation of American writers in New York, including Dwight Macdonald, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Mary McCarthy. Barish sketches de Man's renowned careers at Bard and Yale, as well as the circumstances surrounding his loving—but bigamous—second marriage to former Bard student Patricia Kelley, who created the tranquillity he so lacked. Juxtaposing this personal story to his meteoric rise through American academia, Barish traces the origins of the philosophical deconstructionism that he later created with Jacques Derrida, showing how de Man attracted followers with his attack on the hypocrisy of society that attempts to cover up the "essential alienation" of art from "the system." While focusing on the biographical facts, this commanding and psychologically probing biography reveals as much about human behavior and the cross-currents of twentieth-century intellectual thought as it does about the man who held an entire generation in his thrall.

Assesses Mircea Eliade's contribution to the contemporary understanding of religion and the academic study of religion.

This anthology collects texts and papers from the Paul de Man archive, including essays on art, translations, critical fragments, research plans, interviews, and reports on the state of comparative literature. These texts offer a fascinating insight into the work of one of the twentieth century's most important literary theorists. The volume engages with Paul de Man's institutional life, gathering together pedagogical and critical material to investigate his profound influence on the American academy and theory today. It also contains a number of substantial, previously unpublished and untranslated texts by de Man from the span of his writing career. As a new collection of primary sources this volume further stimulates the growing reappraisal of de Man's work.

The essays in this volume have all been carefully chosen by Cynthia Chase to exemplify the most important strands in contemporary critical thought on Romantic literature, in particular the best of recent feminist, deconstructive, and new historicist writing. They include contributions from critics such as Paul de Man, Mary Jacobus, Marjorie Levinson and Jerome Christensen. The collection, with its substantial introduction and judicious selection of key work, explains the significance of recent critical debate by relating it to fundamental critical questions that define Romanticism. Through the course of their analyses the essays offer answers to perhaps the most essential question posed by the Romantic period: what is the role of language in history?