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| For more than fifty years, Geoffrey Hartman has been a pivotal figure in the humanities. In his first book, in 1954, he helped establish the study of Romanticism as key to the problems of modernity. Later, his writings were crucial to the explosive developments in literary theory in the late seventies, and he was a pioneer in Jewish studies, trauma studies, and studies of the Holocaust. At Yale, he was a founder of its Judaic Studies program, as well as of the first major video archive for Holocaust testimonies.Generations of students have benefited from Hartman’s generosity, his penetrating and incisive questioning, the wizardry of his close reading, and his sense that the work of a literary scholar, no less than that of an artist, is a creative act. All these qualities shine forth in this intellectual memoir, which will stand as his autobiography. Hartman describes his early education, uncanny sense of vocation, and development as a literary scholar and cultural critic. He looks back at how his career was influenced by his experience, at the age of nine, of being a refugee from Nazi Germany in the Kindertransport. He spent the next six years at school in England, where he developed his love of English literature and the English countryside, before leaving to join his mother in America.Hartman treats us to a “biobibliography” of his engagements with the major trends in literary criticism. He covers the exciting period at Yale handled so controversially by the media and gives us vivid portraits, in particular, of Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida.SEND GEOFFREY COVER COPY All this is set in the context of his gradual self-awareness of what scholarship implies and how his personal displacements strengthened his calling to mediate between European and American literary cultures. Anyone looking for a rich, intelligible account of the last half-century of combative literary studies will want to read Geoffrey Hartman’s unapologetic scholar’s tale. |
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Geoffrey Hartman is Sterling Professor Emeritus and Comparative Literature at Yale, and Project Director of its Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. His most recent books are The Geoffrey Hartman Reader, winner of the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism in Honor of Newton Arvin; Scars of the Spirit; The Longest Shadow; and a new edition of Criticism in the Wilderness. View all books by Geoffrey Hartman |
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| | "In the first several pages of this remarkable volume, Hartman immediately plunges the reader into his literary and referential universe by alluding to such disparate notables as John Crowe Ransom, William Wordsworth, John Milton, Mel Gibson, and Eva Hoffman. Intertextual references abound throughout, providing a glimpse into the author's learned, searching mind. He recounts his own escape from the Nazis on a Kindertransport in 1939,connecting that event to the literary scholar he became. Hartman devotes most of his memoir to his intellectual journey--from his romance with the Romantic poets and new criticism to his experimentation with other theoretical approaches and eventual turn to Holocaust and genocide studies. Along the way, he recounts his years at Yale; his, | | -friendships with Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Erich Auerbach; and the evolution of his own approach to literary interpretation, which, perforce, constitutes the trajectory of 20th-century literary history. Rather than chapter titles, the book includes sidebar summaries that guide the reader through the sometimes dizzying and pithy reflections on German philosophy, deconstruction, academic politics, cultural studies, Marxism, and Judaic studies. Highly recommended." |
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