- 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).
- The Wispelaere made his debut in 1958 with the short story Scherzando ma no troppo. That work he left to follow through more than twenty novels, essays, reisimpressies and diaries.
- He made his literary debut with stories which were published in magazines.
- De Wispelaere started his professional career at the school for teachers in Bruges, and from 1972 until 1992 he lectured in Dutch literature at the University of Antwerp.
- He was awarded the Dutch Letters Prizes in 1998.
- Most of his articles were for the 'Nieuw Vlaams Tijdschrift' and later for Herman De Coninck's 'Nieuw Wereldtijdschrift'.
- Born in Bruges, he attended high school at the Sint-Lodewijkscollege in Brugge, where he graduated in Greek-Latin.
- His books deviated greatly from traditional story-telling methods.
- De Wispelaere's interest in 'modern' forms (which from the 1980s onwards have been known as 'postmodern') was already evident from his editorship, from 1956 to 1962, of the Antwerp avant-garde magazine De Tafelronde, and afterwards of Komma (1965-1969), a magazine in which, paradoxically, the preference for formal analysis went hand-in-hand with an explicit appreciation of the egodocument and diary.
- He started his career as an author at the end of the 1950's.
- He wrote as a critic in many literary journals about other authors including Louis-Paul Boon.
- Well as being an author, Paul de Wispelaere also lectured at the Antwerp University until 1992.
- He worked on various literary programmes for what was then the BRT (Belgian Radio & Television).
- He received in the course of the years many awards, including the Dutch Literature Prize in 1998, the main distinction was.
- Paul de Wispelaere was a socially engaged author with a particular interest for ecology.
- Writing books was not the only activity of The Wispelaere. He also worked as an editor of literary magazines, as a critic, and was professor of Dutch literature.
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