De Man’s Rigor

Abstract

Stories about the development of literary study are often stories about methodological rigor. But what does rigor in literary study entail? One answer can be found in the writings of Paul de Man. This article shows how, for de Man, rigor is bound up with philology , another crucial, if underappreciated, category in his thought. De Man stated that “the turn to theory” was better understood as a “return to philology.” This article examines the return to philology alongside a tradition of twentieth-century European scholarship—including the “critical philology” of Peter Szondi—with which de Man was constantly in dialogue. De Man’s invocations of rigor cannot be understood apart from this scholarly history. In closing, the article turns to de Man’s earliest postwar writings, showing how his thinking about rigor and philology was initiated by an encounter with Martin Heidegger–specifically with the philosopher’s “elucidations” of the poet Friedrich Hölderlin.