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“... theory on both sides of the Atlantic was to open a gate and sponsor an escape. Above all, as Geoffrey Hartman has pointed out, it bankrolled a break-out from Englishness. No longer were knees required to bend before a deadening Matthew Arnold-T. S. Eliot confection of tradition and canon. A different though not unrelated heritage also goaded some of ...”

“... inner murk – his buried life.’ This chapter needs a far more interrogative context, such as Geoffrey Hartman provides in The Fateful Question of Culture (1997). Raine keeps such a context distant by concentrating on the English Eliot. We hear a lot of Arnold and Kipling, something of Browning and Clough, Shakespeare and Milton, less of Pater, but ...”

“... the same has not been true of those restless denizens of the sea of texts, the literary critics. Geoffrey Hartman’s Saving the Text, whose subtitle hopefully sandwiches Derrida between the two bastions of ‘Literature’ and ‘Philosophy’, is a recent and highly impressive example of the recuperative effort which has been expended in responding to ...”

“... misconception of ‘high art’ fostered by such insidious propagandists as Adorno, Benjamin and Geoffrey Hartman of Yale. It is fair to add that what really infuriates Carey is the coexistence in our world of a class that can afford the already heavily subsidised seats at Covent Garden and the myriad fellow humans who live on $2 a day. In so far as we ...”

“... disciple of Paul de Man, next door in the French Department. With de Man and his other colleagues, Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom, Miller achieved national prominence for the ‘Yale school of criticism’ – a prominence certified in 1985 with a wildly overwritten denunciation in the New York Times (‘The Tyranny of the Yale Critics’). Despite all ...”

“... now writes, not the author, in Heidegger’s famous phrasing.’ He believes that because Geoffrey Hartman ‘has argued provocatively that criticism today is at least as creative as contemporary literature,’ the notion has become a fact of the culture: ‘Criticism almost single-handedly, the writers seemingly having nothing to say in the ...”

“... idea of the author’s or composer’s (or, mutatis mutandis, the slave-owner’s) authority. As Geoffrey Hartman has argued, the revisionary ‘reading’ of a text is not parasitic or imitative so much as symbiotic in its relationship with its object. Its role is not limited to the service of the author’s or the composer’s art. On the ...”

“... the consistency of identity, the self as a seamless web. Already the richly humanistic efforts of Geoffrey Hartman, Pierre Bourdieu and Christopher Norris are rescuing the work of Heidegger and de Man without endangering the principle that ideology and text are invariably (if complexly) related. But what do we do with Anthony Blunt? Here was no mere ...”

“... science of literary interpretation.’ That certainly seems closer to Christopher Ricks than to Geoffrey Hartman. But James doesn’t say Sainte-Beuve had a horror of science, only of hardened, inflexible science, and James’s complaint against Taine, by contrast, is that he enjoys his simplifications rather than settles for them, as we all must. And ...”

“... not exist, or that War and Peace is about literariness rather than life, or that the criticism of Geoffrey Hartman or Paul de Man is poetry to be read alongside Byron and Blake, or that literature, as a function of class oppression, is a burden from which we must all be set free. ‘For him the insides of books are ... things like those in his own ...”

“... to be gradually developed by some of the leading Romanticists. For M.H. Abrams, Northrop Frye and Geoffrey Hartman, the date 1798 retains all its charm because it signifies not an echo of 1789 so much as a correction of it – the true spiritual revolution after the false, material and murderous revolution ushered in by 1789. Harold Bloom, Hillis Miller ...”

“... out that some of the most distinguished names in the field – Barthes, Adorno, Foucault, Jameson, Geoffrey Hartman – are remarkably fine stylists, more so than the majority of non-theoretical critics. Writers do not on the whole take kindly to theorists, rather as shamans do not always look with favour on anthropologists. A lot of poets and novelists ...”

“... all of which can naturally be taken as read. And to cap it all, it emerges, from Professor Hartman’s (discreetly constructive) preface that the authors are not entirely at one, that Professor Bloom and he, for example, are probably not deconstructionist mafiosi at all. And it is true that the former does mention one or two difficulties about a view ...”

“... the prerogatives normally accorded to ‘creative’ or ‘imaginative’ writing. Critics like Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller exploit this freedom to the full, deconstructing what they see as the privileged metaphysical status that literary texts have traditionally enjoyed. Up to a point, such practices might seem to square with Kermode’s ...”

“... the lecturer visibly does.As a lecturee he’s almost as animated. I once sat behind Ricks while Geoffrey Hartman delivered a lecture which sliced all the fun and feline energy from Christopher Smart’s cat Jeoffry, and left the fur and paws of the poor creature clinically deconstructed on the lecture room floor. Ricks’s scalp, exposed in noble ...”