Explore the vast range of titles available.

This book examines the affinity between \"theory\" and \"deconstruction\" that developed in the American academy in the 1970s by way of the \"Yale Critics\": Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, sometimes joined by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. With this semi-fictional collective, theory became a media event, first in the academy and then in the wider print media, in and through its phantasmatic link with deconstruction and with \"Yale.\" The important role played by aesthetic humanism in American pedagogical discourse provides a context for understanding theory as an aesthetic scandal, and an examination of the ways in which de Man's work challenges aesthetic pieties helps us understand why, by the 1980s, he above all had come to personify \"theory.\" Combining a broad account of the \"Yale Critics\" phenomenon with a series of careful re-examinations of the event of theory, Redfield traces the threat posed by language's unreliability and inhumanity in chapters on lyric, on Hartman's representation of the Wordsworthian imagination, on Bloom's early theory of influence in the 1970s together with his later media reinvention as the genius of the Western Canon, and on John Guillory's influential attempt to interpret de Manian theory as a symptom of literature's increasing marginality. A final chapter examines Mark Tansey's paintings \"Derrida Queries de Man\" and \"Constructing the Grand Canyon\", works that offer subtle, complex reflections on the peculiar event of theory as-deconstruction in America.

This essay will concentrate on one aspect of Hartman’s famous essay “History and Judgment: The Case of Paul de Man,” focusing on his notion of intellectual responsibility and judgment. I would like to distinguish between Derrida’s melancholic intervention in this affair and Hartman’s mournful one, a distinction that brings about two different notions of responsibility. Hartman introduces a complex idea of judgment which resembles that of Hannah Arendt, though she is not referred to explicitly in that context. To end, a distinction will be made between Hartman’s literary-theoretical task and his moral task, thereby differentiating him from the post-war figure of the philosopher-as-a-reader-of-literature.

This introduction discusses the relationship between \"Trauma and Literature: The Case of Christopher Smart,\" which Geoffrey Hartman was still working on before his death, and Hartman's famous original essay on Jubilate Agno , published in 1974: \"Christopher Smart's Magnificat : Toward a Theory of Representation.\" With the help of Hartman's intermediate drafts and overflow notes to himself, Goodman sketches the continuous line of concern that links this late essay to Hartman's work of the 1970s. She argues that \"Smart's Magnificat \" was already exploring the distinct conditions of thwarted speech that Hartman would later call the literary expression of trauma in Smart and others.

Geoffrey Hartman’s distinctive contribution to Jewish Studies encompasses two separate spheres—a reflection on testimony, poetry, and culture after the Holocaust, as well as an exploration of the Jewish textual tradition, more particularly Midrashic commentary. While seemingly unrelated, Hartman’s writings in the two domains display striking similarities. Both bodies of texts are informed by a tension between two forces: on the one hand an attraction towards an unnamable absolute that eludes representation, disrupts the quotidian, and escapes human grasp, and on the other a humanizing impulse turned towards the unintelligible, the moderate, and the concrete that embraces the impure diversity of everyday life. A reconstruction of the oscillation between these two poles in Hartman’s “Jewish” writings will focus on the intersection between his idea of Judaism and the role of literature and commentary in invoking an intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical intensity without succumbing to the totalizing dangers of the ecstatic and the sublime.

In his memoir A Scholar’s Tale, Geoffrey Hartman recognizes the decisive influence of Erich Auerbach, one of his teachers at Yale, on his own early work. Auerbach came to Yale after having spent the Second World War in Istanbul, where he wrote his magisterial Mimesis. That book not only bears the stamp of the war that was then ravaging Europe, the continent whose literary heritage he aimed to preserve in Mimesis, but also of a second trauma: the demise, somewhere (according to Auerbach) in between Dante and Montaigne, of a divinely sanctioned reality, which condemned the West to the historical world. For Auerbach, what saved this historical reality was the unfulfilled figure of the Incarnation still haunting it against all odds... The influence of Auerbach’s sense of lateness, and of the autumnal literary ethos it sustains, can be traced in Hartman’s lifelong engagement with William Wordsworth, whose exemplary remediation of the loss of rural life, Hartman recognizes, today threatens to fade away in our increasingly networked memory-and mediascapes. It is significant that in the last three decades, Hartman has supplemented his Romanticism and his work on the memory of the Holocaust with an increasingly explicit elaboration of the Jewish imagination. Does this point to the perceived insufficiency of Auerbach’s autumnal stance? Or does the tension between the literary, the disaster, and the religious point to an ethos beyond Incarnation?

\"Smart (Studies) Now\" rethinks the significance of Christopher Smart for authors, critics, and students. While writers from Frances Burney to Allen Ginsberg have rated this elusive author highly, critical appreciation has lagged, often focusing on his madness, or treating him as a hack who got lucky once. This essay extends attention from the linguistic and formal power of Smart's religious verse to highlight his generic range and cross-corpus coherence. Three imperatives to advance Smart studies are formulated: clarity about Smart's influence on authors across various periods, attention to the value and relevance of his complete corpus, and availability of a robust sample of his poetry and prose for classroom use.

The Shape of the Signifieris a critique of recent theory--primarily literary but also cultural and political. Bringing together previously unconnected strands of Michaels's thought--from \"Against Theory\" toOur America--it anatomizes what's fundamentally at stake when we think of literature in terms of the experience of the reader rather than the intention of the author, and when we substitute the question of who people are for the question of what they believe. With signature virtuosity, Michaels shows how the replacement of ideological difference (we believe different things) with identitarian difference (we speak different languages, we have different bodies and different histories) organizes the thinking of writers from Richard Rorty to Octavia Butler to Samuel Huntington to Kathy Acker. He then examines how this shift produces the narrative logic of texts ranging from Toni Morrison'sBelovedto Michael Hardt and Toni Negri'sEmpire. As with everything Michaels writes,The Shape of the Signifieris sure to leave controversy and debate in its wake.

`The critic explicitly acknowledges his dependence on prior words that make his word a kind of answer. He calls to other texts \"that they might answer him.\"' Geoffrey Hartman is the first book devoted to an exploration of the `intellectual poetry' of the critic who, whether or not he `represents the future of the profession', is a unique and major voice in twentieth-century criticism. Professor Atkins explains clearly Hartman's key ideas and places his work in the contexts of Romanticism and Judaism on which he has written extensively. In Geoffrey Hartman he provides a valuable introduction to a major critical voice who has called into question our assumptions about the distinction between commentary and imaginative literature.

Walker examines William Wordsworth's The River Duddon volume and the poems of Geoffrey Hartman. In the shadow of Coleridge's shadowy plans for The Brook, the River Duddon sonnet series has long beckoned readers to pose these midcareer poems among abandoned and remediated romantic schemes for epic. Similarly, the prose Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes\" in the same 1820 book beckons a later generation to model a green (if nationalist) Wordsworth. His interest in The River Duddon volume lies elsewhere, in a set of blank verse poems off the beaten track. But as in most things Wordsworthian, there is a path to these remarkable poems in the work of Geoffrey Hartman.