Geoffrey H. Hartman

Geoffrey H. Hartman (born August 11, 1929, Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany—died March 14, 2016, Hamden, Connecticut, U.S.) was a German-born American literary critic and theorist who opposed Anglo-American formalism, brought Continental thought to North American literary criticism, and championed criticism as a creative act. His works treat criticism and literature as mutually interpenetrating discourses and consider the greatest writing as infinitely interpretable.

As a child Hartman was sent by the Kindertransport to England, where he spent six years before joining his mother in the United States; he became a U.S. citizen in 1946. After studying at Queens College, New York City (B.A., 1949); the University of Dijon, France; and Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (Ph.D., 1953), he embarked on a university teaching career, most of it (1955–62 and 1967–2009) at Yale.

In his first book, The Unmediated Vision (1954), Hartman argued that poetry mediates between its readers and direct experience, much as religion did in more religious eras. Romantic poetry especially interested him, and he wrote several books on William Wordsworth, including Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (1964; rev. ed., 1971) and The Unremarkable Wordsworth (1987). He also edited a collection of Wordsworth’s writings titled Selected Poetry and Prose (1970).

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Aside from his sophisticated rethinking of literary Romanticism, Hartman was known for his historical and more speculative writings on literary criticism and theory. In his essay collection The Fate of Reading (1975), Hartman argued that history, like literature, is open to many interpretations and therefore is also a kind of “critical energy.” In Criticism in the Wilderness (1980), he called for uniting the studies of literature, history, and philosophy and disputed the common notion of criticism as a form separate from and inferior to creative writing. Hartman contributed to the Yale school’s deconstructive manifesto, Deconstruction and Criticism (1979), yet he is only loosely associated with that school. Through his criticism he was always engaging and modifying a variety of stances and theoretical assumptions.

Among Hartman’s later writings are Easy Pieces (1985), Minor Prophecies (1991), The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (1996), The Fateful Question of Culture (1997), and Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity (2002). A Critic’s Journey: Literary Reflections, 1958–1998 (1999) is a collection of essays. Hartman was a 2006 recipient of the University of Iowa’s Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for The Geoffrey Hartman Reader (2004) and in 1972 became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.