In the history of the postwar literary criticism, no one has ever raised such a strong controversy as Paul de Man, the leading critic of the so-called Yale school. Although his name seems to have been considerably faded out from the contemporary literary scene, it still makes a haunting presence in the academy in many ways. The present study is motivated by the realization that the de Man reception of academy has taken a wrong tract by associating him with such phrases as deconstruction in America, the American counterpart of Derrida, or the modern-day inheritor of american formalism. This paper tries, in part, to serve as a corrective to such academic tendencies and instead to investigate de Man's intellectual trajectory from the standpoint of Benjamin specifically in terms of two antithetical categories of symbol and allegory. For this purpose, after reviewing the history of their reception briefly, this paper tries to practice a close reading of de Man's and Benjamin's major works which deal with this issue. Closely related to the issue is the term romanticism, romanticism not as a literary movement but as a touchstone of man's inevitable condition. For both of them romanticism becomes the very site of conflict between two modes of expression, the allegorical and the symbolic, and this motif repeatedly confers upon them a source material for their reflections upon diverse topics. More than any other essay, Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama serves as a decisive material for delving into the shadow of Benjamin in Paul de Man.
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