de Man Overboard!

By Scott McLemee. Evelyn Barish's The Double Life of Paul de Man, from Basic Books, is a scandalous volume, in at least a couple of ways.
At the most obvious level there is troubling nature, even after all this time, of the "the de Man affair" -- the discovery, in 1987, that the preeminent figure among the literary theorists at Yale University had published a substantial body of literary journalism in a Belgian newspaper when it served as a mouthpiece for the Nazis during the occupation. Read more...