His 1967 essay 'Criticism and Crisis' argues that because literary works are understood to be fictions rather than factual accounts, they exemplify the break between a sign and its meaning: literature 'means' nothing, but critics resist this insight because it lays bare 'the nothingness of human matters' (de Man quoting Rousseau, one of his favorite authors). While de Man's work in the 1960s is normally distinguished from his deconstructive work in the 1970s, there is considerable continuity. Hegel, Walter Benjamin, William Butler Yeats, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

De Man elaborated a distinct deconstruction in his philosophically-oriented literary criticism of Romanticism, both English Romanticism and German Romanticism, with particular attention to William Wordsworth, John Keats, Maurice Blanchot, Marcel Proust, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. The two became close friends and colleagues. In 1966, de Man met Jacques Derrida at a conference at Johns Hopkins University on structuralism during which Derrida first delivered his essay ' Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences'. 3 Wartime journalism and anti-Semitic writing.

Memoires for paul de man