ABSTRACT
In 1987 the New York Times published a story scandalous for American academic literary criticism of the time. It revealed that the recently deceased Paul de Man, celebrated professor of comparative literature at Yale University, had published anti-Semitic articles when he was a young journalist in early 1940s Belgium. De Man was the leading American Deconstructive Critic from the late 1960s until his death in 1983. The Times story seemed to confirm what many earlier critics of deconstruction had condemned. Specifically, it suggested why de Man as a literary critic might have programmatically excluded history and politics in favor of exacting explications in his characteristic preoccupation with rhetorical language of canonical literary texts. The story helped justify the widespread hostile description propounded particularly on the left of American deconstruction as a new formalism, a new New Criticism focused on the dynamics of literary language to the exclusion of extrinsic matters like history, society, and political economy. The case of Paul de Man, much written about, revealed major faultlines in the field of contemporary American literary criticism during the fin de siècle.1
