Critic Bios

Jacques Derrida (born 1930) moved to Paris at the age of nineteen to study at the École Normale Supérieure (where he later taught philosophy). His first published work, a study of Edmund Husserl's essay on geometry, appeared in 1962. It was not until the late 1960's that Derrida began to gain a wider reputation. During a conference on French Structuralism held at Johns Hopkins University, Derrida delivered a lecture (titled "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences") which many today see as an early "manifesto" of poststructuralism. Derrida published a number of books in the following years that would lay the foundation for later postructuralist criticism. Derrida continues to lecture in the United States and has been a visiting professor at Yale and at the University of California, Irvine.

Paul de Man (1919-1983) was born in Antwerp, Belgium. His academic career was divided between three universities -- at Cornell (1960-66), Johns Hopkins (1967-70), and at Yale (from 1970 until his death). De Man published relatively few books of criticism during his lifetime; a posthumous collection of essays written between 1956 and 1983 appeared under the title The Rhetoric of Romanticism. Controversy arose over certain details of de Man's life when it was discovered, in 1987, that he had written articles containing anti-Semitic language for a Brussels newspaper during the period of the Nazi occupation.