In this fascinating collection of essays, noted critic Geoffrey Hartman raises the essential question of where we can find the real or authentic in today's world, and how this affects the way we understand our human predicament. Hartman explores such issues as the fantasy of total information and perfect communication encouraged by the internet, the biographical excesses of tell-all talk shows that serve to shore up a personal sense of unreality, the tendency to motivate violence in the name of some (...) moral or spiritual necessity, and the increased difficulty of distinguishing between fakery and truth in confessional and testimonial writing. Underlying the entire book is the crucial issue of how the trauma of the Holocaust and other genocidal acts, brought home to us almost daily by the media, is shaping our quest for agency, identity and meaning. Against what he describes as a contempt for the aesthetic in the face of social suffering, Hartman produces a defense of art that helps to recast these questions. His idea is that the form of contemplation produced by the aesthetic, and particularly by poetry, resists both the fantasy of data delivering up their own final meaning and of ideology as a shortcut seeking to deliver us from literature and other deeply reflective and sometimes vulnerable--because self-critical--modes of expression. (shrink)

Literary criticism is neither more nor less important today than it has been since the becoming an accepted activity in the Renaissance. The humanists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries created the institution of criticism as we know it: the recovery and analysis of works of art. They printed, edited, and interpreted texts that dated from antiquity and which had been lost or disheveled. Evangelical in their fervor, avid in their search for lost or buried riches, they also put into (...) circulation certain influential ideas. Perhaps the most important of these was that the authoritative version of a book is the original version, freed from interpolation and accretion. A correlative idea was that, similarly, one could rely on an original or natural light in the interpreter, an intuitive good sense that helped him to a true understanding of a text if it was a genuine text. . . . There are signs that we are now nearing the end of this Renaissance humanism. Not because of a determinist or providential march of history, but ideas eventually exhaust what influence they may have. Today, after all, there is no dearth of ancient texts, or of new ones. Editing, moreover, has become only too conscious of the difficulty of recovering an "original" version or edition: in Wordsworth scholarship, for example, the authority of the 1850 Prelude, the text approved by the poet shortly before his death, was challenged by the 1805-6 Prelude printed by de Sélincourt in the 1920s; and the authority of this is in turn being eroded by antecedent manuscripts, the so-called "Five-Books Prelude" and "Two-Part Prelude." It is equally precarious to establish the text of Emily Dickinson's poems—which of the variants are to be chosen as definitive? Or, from another angle, Melville's Billy Budd has become a mine for genetic speculation. Even when no editorial problem exists, a philosophical issue arises as to the concept of originality itself.1 · 1. For the time being, it is enough to quote Hegel's provocative attack on all "Ur-Metaphysics": "What comes later is more concrete and richer; the first is abstract, and least differentiated." Geoffrey Hartman, professor of English and comparative literature at Yale University, is the author of The Unmediated Vision, Andre Malraux, Wordsworth's Poetry, Beyond Formalism, and most recently The Fate of Reading. He is currently working on a book to be published in late 1977, Criticism in the Wilderness. (shrink)

In this, the first Reader of Geoffrey Hartman's work, significant essays reflect his abiding interest in English and American poetry, focusing not only on Romanticism but also on the transition from early modern to modern and including reflections on the radical elements in artistic representation.

"Kevin Hart and Geoffrey H. Hartman bring together essays by prominent scholars from a range of disciplines to focus on Blanchot's diverse concerns: literature, art, community, politics, ethics, spirituality, and the Holocaust."--Jacket.

Wallace Martin's response to "Literary Criticism and Its Discontents" is anything but naive. Its most sophisticated device is to posit my invention of a "naive reader" and to suggest that I would place the New Critics and their heirs in that category. But when I see the movement of criticism after Arnold as exhibiting an anti-self-consciousness principle or being so worried about a hypertrophy of the critical spirit that the spirit is acknowledged only by refusing its seminal or creative force, (...) I am not alleging naiveté but "organized innocence," or the privileged assignment of some given, intuitive power of creation to the area of art which excludes the area of philosophy or philosophically-minded commentary. This defensive partition of the critical and the creative spirit, which recognizes the intelligence of the creative writer but refuses the obverse proposition that there may be creative force in the critical writer, I have elsewhere named the Arnoldian concordat. Geoffrey Hartman, professor of English and comparative literature at Yale University, is the author of Criticism in the Wilderness. (shrink)

What gives these words power to speak to us even without the play? No doubt the story of Tereus and Philomela has a universally affecting element: the double violation, the alliance of craft and craft, and what the metaphor specifically refers to: that truth will out, that human consciousness will triumph. The phrase would not be effective without the story, yet its focus is so sharp that a few words seem to yield not simply the structure of one story but (...) that of all stories in so far as they are tell-tales. Aristotle, in fact, mentions Sophocles' kenning during his discussion of how recognition scenes are brought about; and it is interesting that other examples cited by him share the characteristic of seeming to exist prior to the plays that embody them, as if they were riddles or gnomic words imposed by tradition and challenging an adequate setting. Take for example, "So I too must die at the altar like my sister". Or "I came to find my son, and I lose my own life". Or again, "Here we are doomed to die, for here we were cast forth". These phrases, overheard, bring about a recognition. Like "the voice of the shuttle" they have little meaning without a story that sets them. Yet once a story is found their suggestiveness is not absorbed but rather potentiated. And this, perhaps, is what archetype means: a part greater than the whole of which it is a part, a text that demands a context yet is not reducible to it. (shrink)