Paul de Man (Routledge Critical Thinkers)

Paul de Man died of cancer in 1983 at the relatively early age of sixtyfour. Towards the end of those sixty-four years he had begun to emerge as a literary critic and philosophical thinker of international standing. At his memorial service the French philosopher Jacques Derrida described his friend’s achievement as a transformation of ‘the field of literary theory, revitalising all the channels that irrigate it both inside and outside the university, in the United States and Europe’ (Derrida 1989, vxii).