Geoffrey Hartman

Geoffrey Hartman is Karl Young Professor of English at Yale and author of Criticism in the Wilderness and Saving the text.

Letter

Intolerable

24 January 1985

SIR: A lapse is a lapse: which does not mean one has to accept what Mr Tanner (Letters, 4 April) makes of it in his intolerant attitude toward my work and the essay on Leavis in particular. I wonder about his intent if he can so misread an essay which does not set up the false dichotomy of literary theory and practical criticism, and certainly does not disparag the latter. I tried to clarify Leavis’s...
Letter

Reprosuctive

4 March 1982

SIR: Stephen Bann is right in placing Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination and Glas in the context of the Tel Quel group (LRB, 4 March). Derrida is a highly original but also intensely assimilative writer – his own term is ‘reprosuctive’. But the Tel Quel group should not be overvalued – even in their divergence from Derrida – as they acknowledge the Return of the Sacred. In this regard the...

Hostility tends to make people sound more powerful than they really are. Eliot against the Romantics, Leavis against Milton, Empson against Christianity, Ricks against Theory. By the 1990s, when...

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Theory and Truth

Frank Kermode, 21 November 1991

The autumn catalogues of some very enterprising publishers announce as many books as usual under the rubric Literary Criticism, or possibly more, but few have titles of a sort that, even ten...

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Vanishings

Peter Swaab, 20 April 1989

Wordsworth’s poetry has been able to animate critical writing, relevantly, from several different points of view. Narratologists have discussed the gaps in his storytelling and the...

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For good or bad

Christopher Ricks, 19 December 1985

Geoffrey Hartman’s Easy Pieces can be hard going. ‘To see, oneself unseen, as at the movies, is only less than the ecstasy of an unseeing seeing: of going beyond the non-language of...

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Out of Germany

E.S. Shaffer, 2 October 1980

Rosemary Ashton traces the impact of some German writers, especially Goethe, on the British periodicals and on four writers, Coleridge, Carlyle, Eliot and Lewes; Geoffrey Hartman ranges widely...

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The Deconstruction Gang

S.L. Goldberg, 22 May 1980

In reviewing a book on literary theory recently, a noted American structuralist, Jonathan Culler, drew a stern line between the sort of assumptions about literature that might do for ordinary...

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