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Geoffrey H. Hartman

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Born: August 10 1929

Died: 1313 03 20162016

From NYT obituary: Geoffrey H. Hartman, a literary critic whose work took in the Romantic poets, Judaic sacred texts, Holocaust studies, deconstruction and the workings of memory — and took on the very function of criticism itself — died on March 14 at his home in Hamden, Conn. He was 86.

His death was announced by Yale University, where he was the Sterling professor emeritus of English and comparative literature.

Considered one of the world’s foremost scholars of literature, Professor Hartman was associated with the “Yale School,” a cohort of literary theorists that included Harold Bloom, J. Hillis Miller and Paul de Man. Their work was rooted in deconstruction, the approach to analyzing the multilayered relationship between a text and its meaning that was advanced by the 20th-century French philosopher Jacques Derrida.

Professor Hartman was renowned for his vast Continental erudition. His scholarly attention ranged over Wordsworth, to whom he was long devoted; the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins; Judaica ; Alfred Hitchcock; Freud; detective stories; and the nature of trauma, the memory of trauma and testimony about trauma — interests borne of his own wartime experience — as well as the ways in which traumatic recollections can be filtered through the creative imagination.

Among his best-known books are “Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814” ; “Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today” , considered a landmark in the field; “The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust” ; and a memoir, “A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe” .

He was the first director of what is now the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale. Begun in 1979, the archive, which is open to the public, comprises more than 4,000 interviews with Holocaust survivors, witnesses and liberators from around the world.

As a result of his association with the Yale School, Professor Hartman was often called a deconstructionist, but his critical stance eluded tidy classification.

Deconstruction maintains that any given text is, below its surface, a roiling system of conflicting semantic signs. As such, the text has no one empirical reading; it is, rather, a network of competing meanings — a quicksilver state of affairs that a critical analysis of that text must take into account.

Early on, Professor Hartman championed this approach. But over time he went deconstruction one better, arguing that a literary text is so pregnant with possible readings that to make an evaluative judgment about it — or even, perhaps, to extract an inventory of its meanings — is futile.

By longstanding tradition, as Professor Hartman reminded his readers, literary criticism was seen as a handmaiden of literature — an adjunct whose sole raison d’être was literature itself.

In “Criticism in the Wilderness,” he argued that criticism should not only stand on an equal footing with literature but also be literature.

In elevating criticism to the status of literature, Professor Hartman did not mean merely that it should be well written. What he also meant was that criticism should function for criticism’s sake alone.

“The spectacle of the critic’s mind disoriented, bewildered, caught in some ‘wild surmise’ about the text and struggling to adjust — is not that one of the interests critical writing has for us?” he wrote in “Criticism in the Wilderness.”

He continued: “In more casual acts of reading this bewilderment can be muted, for there is always the hint of a resolution further on, or an enticement to enter for its own

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Geoffrey H. Hartman

Geoffrey H. Hartman

Books from Geoffrey H. Hartman

Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy

Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787 - 1814

A Scholar's Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe

Shakespeare and the Question of Theory

The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust

The Geoffrey Hartman Reader

The Chocolate Deal

The Fateful Question of Culture

Viitorul amintirii şi Holocaustul

Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes Of Memory

Minor Prophecies: The Literary Essay in the Culture Wars

The Unmediated Vision (Classic Reprint): An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke, and Valéry

The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke, and Val�ry (Classic Reprint)

Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective

The Third Pillar: Essays in Judaic Studies

Selected Poetry and Prose of William Wordsworth

Easy Pieces

After Strange Texts: The Role of Theory in the Study of Literature

Die Zukunft der Erinnerung und der Holocaust

The Power of Contestation: Perspectives on Maurice Blanchot