Geoffrey Hartman

Geoffrey H. Hartman (born 1929) is a German born American literary theorist, sometimes identified with the Yale School of deconstruction, but also characterized as something of an individualist and maverick. He was born in Germany, in an Ashkenazi Jewish family. He came to the United States in 1946, and later became an American citizen.

He is now "Sterling Professor emeritus of English and Comparative Literature" at Yale University. One of his long term interests is the English poet, William Wordsworth

Hartman is also one of the leading members of the deconstructionist school of criticism. One of his works that explicitly display his position as a deconstructionist is "The Interpreter's Freud" which talks of the human cognition as being defined by many variants and has no particular scientifically proven definition. This piece was originally presented as the 1984 Freud Lecture at Yale.

Works

*"The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke, and Valéry" (1954)
*"André Malraux" (1960)
*"Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814" (1964)
*"Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays, 1958-1970" (1970)
*"The Fate of Reading and Other Essays" (1975)
*"Geoffrey Hartman: Akiba's children" (1978)
*"Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today" (1980)
*"Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy" (1981)
*"Easy Pieces" (1985)
*"Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective" (1986, editor)
*"The Unremarkable Wordsworth" (1987)
*"Minor Prophecies: The Literary Essay in the Culture Wars" (1991)
*"The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust" 1996
*"The Fateful Question of Culture" 1997
*"A Critic's Journey: Literary Reflections, 1958-1998" (1999)
*"Scars of the Spirit : The Struggle Against Inauthenticity" (2004)

External links

* [http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~scctr/Wellek/hartman/index.html Hartman bibliography]
* [http://www.literatureclassics.com/showessayprint.asp?IDNo=580 Essay discussing the theories of Hartman and others]
* [http://www.forward.com/articles/13426/ Article on Hartman's memoirs]

ee also

*list of deconstructionists