Ortwin de Graef, the Belgian researcher who discovered de Man’s wartime journalism, credits her with uncovering some important documents, including the prospectus for the art journal, written with the pro-Nazi newspaper editor Raymond De Becker, who was sentenced to death for treason after the war.

But Mr. de Graef questioned the suggestion that the document showed deeper pro-Nazi sympathies in de Man, noting that the part Ms. Barish says is in his handwriting “turns out to be pretty bland stuff about implementation.”

“It just confirms what we already knew,” he said in an interview. “De Man is doing something he likes doing, publishing art magazines, and he’s willing to do it with a Nazi nitwit.”

Peter Brooks, a former Yale colleague of de Man’s now at Princeton, called Ms. Barish’s book “fascinating at times,” but faulted her for depicting his early career in America as part of a long con rather than the beginnings of a serious intellectual enterprise.

“I’m not saying his past should be forgotten — far from it,” said Mr. Brooks, who has reviewed “The Double Life of Paul de Man” for The New York Review of Books. “But it shouldn’t be used as a blunt instrument to dismiss all his thought.”

Ms. Barish’s story effectively ends in 1960, when de Man left Harvard for Cornell. She has little to say about his years at Yale, where he helped give deconstructive theory a foothold in America, and she admits to having spent little time with his mature writings. “In another lifetime, I would have gotten hold of more of it,” she said. “In many ways, I don’t understand it.” But her verdict on his philosophy — “this idea that meaning cannot be pinned down,” and that “clear-cut moral judgments are impossible,” as she put it — is unstinting. “To me,” she said, “it’s just a waste of time.”

To admirers of de Man’s work, Ms. Barish’s interpretation is a gross misreading. It was not, they say, a nihilistic flight from truth and history, but a painstaking confrontation with the instability of the rhetoric underlying our larger claims for meaning. Still, few would dispute that the scandal over the wartime journalism damaged the careers of some of de Man’s students — “Some people reacted very defensively and boxed themselves in,” said Thomas Keenan, a former de Man student now teaching at Bard — while his work virtually disappeared from course syllabuses.