Search results for ""Author Geoffrey Hartman""

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. 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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Why should we be excluded from the history and literature of Judaism because the world of our fathers and mothers became a secularized one, Geoffrey Hartman asks, or because religious literacy, whatever our faith or community affiliation, has gone into relative decline? And why, he asks, do those who have no trouble finding pleasure and intellectual profit in the Greek and Roman classics or in the literary and artistic productions of two millennia of Western Christianity not easily find equal resonance and reward in the major texts in the Jewish tradition? For if Christianity and the classical inheritance stand as two pillars of Western civilization, surely the third pillar is the Jewish tradition. In The Third Pillar Hartman, one of the most influential scholars and teachers of English and comparative literature of recent decades, has brought together some of the most important and eloquent essays he has written since the 1980s on the major texts of the Jewish tradition. In three groupings, on Bible, Midrash, and education, Hartman clarifies the relevance of contemporary literary criticism to canonical texts in the tradition, while demonstrating what has been—and what still remains to be—learned from the Midrash to enrich the interpretation of commentary and art, sacred or secular. "The map of the discipline [of Jewish studies] is still being drawn," Hartman writes. "Barely known areas tempt the explorer, and major reinterpretations remain possible. This third pillar of our civilization . . . is only now being fully excavated: we have discovered something but not everything about its structure and upholding function."

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The recording, explanation and the inescapable task of judging great wrongs in the past presents historians with their most difficult assignment. For those who have either lived through such injustice or have been in some way responsible for it the impositions of memory are both painful and unavoidable. Memory shapes the future, and the recollections of past suffering haunt and may overwhelm generations long after. In 1938 the National Socialist Party in Germany began the final preparations for the systematic genocide of the Jews throughout Europe. For the Jews, whose national loyalties had long exceeded any ties of ethnicity, the programme of extermination was an act not merely of monstrous cruelty but of humiliation and treachery. In Holocaust Remembrance scholars, artists and writers consider the ways in which the events of 1938-1945 have been, might be, and will be remembered. The records of the Holocaust are vast and various, ranging from the museum at Auschwitz to the cartoons of Art Spiegelman, from the dark paintings of R. B. Kitaj to the elegaic stories of Primo Levi, from the filmed testimonies of the death camp survivors to revisionist historians who usurp the name of scholar in the pursuit of denial and evasion. The perspectives brought to bear here are rich and various - impassioned, objective, personal, poetical, historical and philosophical. They are united by an awareness of the dangers both of respectful silence and overwhelming information, and that only in remembering can an understanding of the past be sought and human kind redeemed from the forces of humiliation and guilt.

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One of our most incisive critics asks where the assault against the canons of Western culture has led us. Engaging a wide range of literature and criticism, Hartman considers the term "culture" and its many uses, and calls for the restoration of literature to its place as the focus of thinking about culture and for the renewal of aesthetic education to help ensure the balance between art, culture, and politics. Lost among the shouts and skirmishes of the "culture wars" is the very idea of culture itself. In this illuminating book, one of our most distinguished critics and scholars asks what the assault against the canons of Western culture has left in its place. If art and literature are largely the products of ideology and interest, how do they matter? And what does the idea of culture mean in today's sprawling, fragmented, critical world where everything -poetry or pornography- gets "read" in the same way? Engaging an extraordinary range of literature, philosophy, social criticism, and popular culture, Geoffrey Hartman probes the meanings and uses of culture in contemporary society. The triumph of cultural studies -and its critiques of bourgeois Eurocentric tradition- is largely complete, Hartman writes. Against the political appropriation of culture, he posits, instead, a definition of culture as public conversation, intellectual and social debate among diverse communities. And against reactionary pressures to impose -or reinstate- a singular culture, or to seek in art or literature an affirmation of group identity, Hartman sketches new roles for human imagination in a postmodern world. For Hartman, the fusion of culture and politics, of whatever ideology, is disastrous. At a time of abstraction, fragmentation, and alienation, art and literature offer wholeness and meaning. But the promise is frought with danger, Hartman argues, in a provocative discussion of the uses of culture as exemplified in the Romantic legacy. He pays special attention to literature's role in reconnecting us to the world. The choice is ours: Wordsworth or Heidegger, literature as shared experience or as reactionary ideology. Hartman ranges widely in these elegant pages. He confronts the shock to the universalistic sense of culture from the Holocaust, as well as the problematic responses of such critic as Adorno and Derrida; explores the poetry of Wordsworth both as a diagnostic and a counter-model to the desensitization of modern life; and addresses the impact of politics of inclusion and diversity on the claims of high culture. Perhaps Hartman's most publicly engaged book, The Fateful Question of Culture embraces both the masterworks of European literature and art and the signs and symbols of popular media and daily life. It is a powerful reaffirmation of the liberating discourses that have always been at the very center of the Western tradition.

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