Brooke winek

When the Yale literary theorist Paul de Man died in 1983 , he was hailed as a brilliant teacher who had helped turn deconstruction, the critical approach originated by Jacques Derrida, into an insurgent force in American intellectual life. Four years later, though, the discovery that as a young man in Nazi-occupied Belgium de Man had written some 200 literary articles for a collaborationist newspaper — including a 1941 essay musing on the impact on European literature if the Jews were relocated to an isolated colony — landed like a bombshell. De Man’s photograph appeared in Newsweek, juxtaposed with images of Nazis on the march. And critics of deconstruction , inside and outside the academy, pounced, arguing that a school of thought long dismissed as cultish “critical terrorism” was something even more sinister. Those battles may seem like a distant memory. But now, the first full-length biography of de Man threatens to reopen the debate over his legacy, weaving together … [Read more...] about Revisiting a Scholar Unmasked by Scandal

See the article in its original context from February 9, 1986 Section Page Buy Reprints View on timesmachine TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. THE ENGLISH department at Yale used to resemble a sort of English country estate. It included a great house of many wings and rooms (the Elizabethan Pavilion, the Metaphysical Poets Billiard Parlor, the T. S. Eliot Chapel and so forth) and, normally, one entered this house via certain well-marked paths and avenues that ran through a spacious park. The park looked as though Nature had … [Read more...] about THE TYRANNY OF THE YALE CRITICS

See the article in its original context from August 28, 1988 Section Page Buy Reprints View on timesmachine TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. THE BAR IN THE AUDITORIUM lobby at the University of Antwerp was crowded with scholars in baggy suits, itinerant students, assorted hangers-on. There were also a few prosperous-looking older men, who turned out to be childhood friends of Paul de Man - the focus of an international conference held last June at the university. You wouldn't have known from the sessions listed in the … [Read more...] about The Case of Paul De Man

See the article in its original context from February 25, 1984 Section Page Buy Reprints View on timesmachine TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. When he died last December at the age of 64, Paul de Man left behind a provocative school of literary criticism that will be studied by generations of scholars to come. And even now, two months after his death, his students and colleagues at Yale University say his absence - as teacher, as critic, as inspiration - has left a huge gap. The death of a professor leaves a university … [Read more...] about YALE STILL FEELING LOSS OF REVERED PROFESSOR

See the article in its original context from June 5, 1988 Section Page Buy Reprints View on timesmachine TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. THE PHILOSOPHER GEORGE SANTAYANA was once asked which books young people should read. It didn't matter, he replied, as long as they read the same ones. Generations of Eng. lit. majors in American colleges followed his advice. You started with the Bible, moved briskly through Beowulf and Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton, the 18th-century novel, the Romantics, a few big American books like … [Read more...] about ON CAMPUS: THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS

At the age of 80, with almost 40 books behind him and nearly as many accumulated honors, Harold Bloom has written, in “The Anatomy of Influence,” a kind of summing-up — or, as he puts it in his distinctive idiom, mixing irony with histrionism, “my virtual swan song,” born of his urge “to say in one place most of what I have learned to think about how influence works in imaginative literature.” Influence has long been Bloom’s abiding preoccupation, and the one that established him, in the 1970s, as a radical, even disruptive presence amid the groves of academe. This may surprise some who think of Bloom primarily as a stalwart of the Western canon, fending off the assaults of “the School of Resentment” and its “rabblement of lemmings,” or as a self-confessed Bardolator, swooning over “Hamlet” and “Lear.” Not that Bloom abjures these subsequent selves. There is much canon fodder in this new book, along with re­affirmed vows of fidelity to Shakespeare, “the founder” not only of modern … [Read more...] about Harold Bloom: An Uncommon Reader