- Paul De Wispelaere was born on July 4, 1928 in Assebroek, Flanders, belgium. He was an actor, known for Vergeet niet te lezen (1955) and Is de roman dood? (1968). He was married to Ilse Logie. He died on November 2, 2016 in Maldegem, Flanders, Belgium.
- SpouseIlse Logie(? - December 2, 2016) (his death)
- He wrote contributions to Dietsche Warande en Belfort, De Tafelronde, Diagram, Komma, Nieuw Vlaams Tijdschrift, Het Vaderland, De Vlaamse Gids, Kunst van Nu, Nieuw Wereldtijdschrift, and Literatuur'.
- Paul de Wispelaere was a critical free-thinker.
- He studied Germanic philology at the University of Ghent and obtained a PhD in 1974.
- The work of writer, essayist and critic Paul de Wispelaere is highly characteristic of the development of literature and literary criticism in Dutch during the second half of the twentieth century. When he came on the scene in the mid-sixties, De Wispelaere was much impressed by both the French nouveau roman and the nouvelle critique which at that time was coming to the fore in the Paris-based group Tel Quel. Like the representatives of this nouvelle critique who were developing a European variant of the American New Criticism, De Wispelaere opted for a formal structuralist approach to literature. For him, literature was primarily a question of form and language. But unlike the New Critics, whose main emphasis in their 'close reading' was on the study of poetic language and the 'unity' of the closed, complete literary work, De Wispelaere showed a great affinity with the ideologically charged criticism, or critique d'interprétation, which engages the entire personality of the critic. This he found in the multi-faceted example - of Roland Barthes. Like Barthes who in S /Z (1970) and The Pleasure of the Text (1973) proposed a way of reading that recognises the pluralism of a literary text, De Wispelaere also resisted looking for and finding the meaning of a text: he prefered openness and mutability, incompleteness and elusiveness.
- His autobiographically prose is related to the French nouveau roman, as in Scherzando ma non tropo (1959) and Mijn levende schaduw (E: My living shadow) (1965).
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