Table Of ContentGeoffrey Hartman
Also available from Continuum
Interrupting Auschwitz, Josh Cohen
Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida, Ruben Borg
Geoffrey Hartman
Romanticism after the Holocaust
Pieter Vermeulen
Continuum International Publishing Group
The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane
11 York Road Suite 704
London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038
www.continuumbooks.com
© Pieter Vermeulen 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
in writing from the publishers.
Pieter Vermeulen has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identifi ed as Author of this work.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-4411-9324-7 (hardcover)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vermeulen, Pieter.
Geoffrey Hartman : romanticism after the Holocaust / Pieter Vermeulen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-1-4411-9324-7 (hardcover)
1. Hartman, Geoffrey H. 2. Criticism--History--20th century.
3. Romanticism--History--20th century. I. Title.
PN75.H33V47 2010
801'.95092--dc22
[B]
2009048033
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group
Contents
Abbreviations vi
Introduction: Romanticism after Trauma 1
1. Counter-Spirits: Immediacy, History, Nature 8
2. Of Climatology: Literature after Structure 39
3. Memorial Mimesis: The Ecology of Literary Knowledge 61
4. Grave Immunity: Poetry and the Preservation of Loss 83
5. “Darkness makes abode”: Mourning, Testimony, Community 100
Coda: Wordsworth after the Holocaust 131
Acknowledgments 138
Notes 139
Works Cited 156
Index 175
Abbreviations
References to Geoffrey Hartman’s works are preceded by the initials listed here
in alphabetical order. Complete bibliographical information for these items
can be found in the works cited section. Hartman’s works are listed there
chronologically by date of fi rst publication, which I have added here in order to
facilitate cross-reference.
1. Books
AM A ndré Malraux (1960)
BF B eyond Formalism (1970)
CJ A Critic’s Journey (1999)
CW Criticism in the Wilderness (1980)
EP Easy Pieces (1985)
FQ The Fateful Question of Culture (1997)
FR The Fate of Reading (1975)
GH The Geoffrey Hartman Reader (2004)
IJ A Scholar’s Tale (2007)
LS T he Longest Shadow (1996)
MP M inor Prophecies (1991)
SS S cars of the Spirit (2002)
ST Saving the Text (1981)
UV T he Unmediated Vision (1954)
UW T he Unremarkable Wordsworth (1987)
WP Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (1964)
2. Articles, Essays, Reviews, Interviews
“AA” “Structuralism: The Anglo-American Adventure” (1966)
“AC” “ The State of the Art of Criticism” (1989)
“AE” “Is an Aesthetic Ethos Possible? Night Thoughts after Auschwitz”
(1994)
“AG” “ Adam on the Grass with Balsamum” (1969)
“AI” “ The Struggle Against the Inauthentic: An Interview by Nicholas
Chare” (2004)
“AP” “Art and Consensus in the Era of Progressive Politics” (1992)
“AS” “ Romanticism and ‘Anti-Self-Consciousness’” (1962)
Abbreviations vii
“BF” “ Beyond Formalism” (1966)
“BH” “ Benjamin in Hope” (1999)
“BM” “ Introduction: 1985” to Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (1986)
“BP” “Blake and the ‘Progress of Poesy’” (1969)
“BS” “ ‘Breaking with every star’: On Literary Knowledge” (1996)
“BT” “ Blessing the Torrent: On Wordsworth’s Later Style” (1978)
“CA” “ The Cinema Animal: On Spielberg’s Schindler’s List” (1995)
“CC” “The Culture of Criticism” (1984)
“CD” “ Literary Criticism and Its Discontents” (1976)
“CI” “ Criticism, Indeterminacy, Irony” (1980)
“CM” “ Camus and Malraux: The Common Ground” (1960)
“CR” “ Criticism and Restitution” (1989)
“CS” “ Christopher Smart’s Magnifi cat: Toward a Theory of Representa-
tion” (1974)
“DC” “ The Dream of Communication” (1973)
“DD” “ Diction and Defense in Wordsworth” (1980)
“DF” “ The Discourse of a Figure: Blake’s ‘Speak Silence’ in Literary History”
(1987)
“DS” “ Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches and the Growth of the Poet’s
Mind” (1961)
“DV” “Introduction: Darkness Visible” (1994)
“EM” “Envoi: ‘So many things’” (1986)
“ES” “Refl ections on the Evening Star: Akenside to Coleridge” (1971)
“ET” “ The Ethics of Witness” (interview by Ian Balfour and Rebecca Comay)
(2002)
“EW” “ Elation in Hegel and Wordsworth” (1987)
“FC” “Psychoanalysis: The French Connection” (1978)
“FE” “ Freud for Everyman (and Everywoman)” (2005)
“FN” “ The Fulness and Nothingness of Literature” (1955)
“FR” “ The Fate of Reading” (1975)
“FS” “ Maurice Blanchot: Fighting Spirit” (2003)
“FT” “ False Themes and Gentle Minds” (1968)
“GD” “ Ghostlier Demarcations” (1966)
“GL” “ Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci” (1968)
“HA” “ Holocaust Testimony, Art, and Trauma” (1996)
“HG” “ Homage to Glas” (2007)
“HH” “ Holocaust and Hope” (2003)
“HL” “ Communication, Language, and the Humanities” (1981)
“HR” “ The Heroics of Realism” (1963)
“HT” “ The Humanities of Testimony: An Introduction” (2006)
“HW” “ History-Writing as Answerable Style” (1970)
“IC” “ An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman” (interview by Cathy Caruth)
(1996)
“IF” “ The Interpreter’s Freud” (1984)
viii Abbreviations
“IM” “Introduction” to Midrash and Literature (1986)
“IP” “ Introduction” to The Power of Contestation (2004)
“IS” Interview by Imre Salusinszky (1987)
“JI” “ On the Jewish Imagination” (1985)
“JP” “ History and Judgment: The Case of Paul de Man” (1988)
“JT” “Jewish Tradition as/and the Other” (1993)
“LC” “ Letter” (letter in Critical Inquiry) (1989)
“LH” “Toward Literary History” (1970)
“LL” “ A Life of Learning” (2000)
“LS” “The Longest Shadow” (1989)
“MB” “ Maurice Blanchot: Philosopher-Novelist” (1961)
“MC” “ Milton’s Counterplot” (1958)
“ME” “Meaning, Error, Text” (1985)
“MI” “Interview with Geoffrey Hartman, Yale University, March 19, 1979”
(interview by Robert Moynihan) (1980)
“MM” “ Polemical Memoir” (1999)
“MS” “ Marvell, St. Paul, and the Body of Hope” (1964)
“NF” “‘The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn’: A Brief
Allegory” (1968)
“NW” “ The New Wilderness: Critics as Connoisseurs of Chaos” (1983)
“PD” “ Public Memory and Its Discontents” (1994)
“PE” “ Passion and Literary Engagement” (2004)
“PI” “ Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats’s ‘To Autumn’” (1973)
“PM” “ Public Memory and Modern Experience” (1993)
“PN” “ Plenty of Nothing: Hitchcock’s North by Northwest” (1981)
“PP” “The Poet’s Politics” (1970)
“PR” “The Poetics of Prophecy” (1981)
“PS” “ Preface to the Second Edition” (preface to the second edition of
Criticism in the Wilderness) (2007)
“PW” “ A Poet’s Progress: Wordsworth and the Via Naturaliter Negativa.”
(1962)
“RA” “Reading Aright: Keats’s ‘Ode to Psyche’” (1983)
“RF” “ Refl ections on Romanticism in France” (1970)
“RH” “The Reinvention of Hate” (1996)
“RL” “ Religious Literacy” (1988)
“RM” “ The Psycho-Aesthetics of Romantic Moonshine: Wordsworth’s
Profane Illumination” (2006)
“RR” “Reading and Representation: Wordsworth’s ‘Boy of Winander’” (1994)
“SA” “ The Interpreter: A Self-Analysis” (1973)
“SF” “ The Struggle for the Text” (1986)
“SH” “ The Sublime and the Hermeneutic” (1972)
“SI” “Shoah and Intellectual Witness” (1998)
“SL” “Maurice Blanchot: The Spirit of Language after the Holocaust” (2004)
“SP” “ A Short History of Practical Criticism” (1979)
Abbreviations ix
“SS” “ Spectral Symbolism and the Authorial Self: An Approach to Keats’s
Hyperion” (1974)
“ST” “ Signs of the Times” (1971)
“TC” “ A Touching Compulsion: Wordsworth and the Problem of Literary
Representation” (1977)
“TD” “ Memory.com: Tele-Suffering and Testimony in the Dot Com Era”
(2000)
“TH” “ Self, Time, and History” (1975)
“TL” “Trauma within the Limits of Literature” (2003)
“TK” “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies” (1995)
“TM” “ The Taming of History: A Comparison of Poetry with Painting Based
on Malraux’s The Voices of Silence” (1957)
“TR” “Theories on the Theory of Romanticism” (1971)
“TS” “Text and Spirit” (1999)
“TT” “Tea and Totality: The Demand of Theory on Critical Style” (1986)
“TU” “‘Timely Utterance’ Once More” (1985)
“UA” “ The Use and Abuse of Structural Analysis: Riffaterre’s Interpretation
of Wordsworth’s ‘Yew-Trees’” (1975)
“UW” “The Unremarkable Wordsworth” (1985)
“VS” “The Voice of the Shuttle” (1969)
“VW” “Virginia’s Web” (1961)
“WA” “War in Heaven” (1973)
“WB” “Wordsworth before Heidegger” (1987)
“WE” “ Reading: The Wordsworthian Enlightenment” (2005)
“WG” “‘Was it for this . . .?’: Wordsworth and the Birth of the Gods” (1990)
“WH” “The Weight of What Happened” (1983)
“WI” “Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry” (1965)
“WL” “ Wordsworth and Goethe in Literary History” (1975)
“WM” “ Wordsworth and Metapsychology” (2009)
“WN” “Words Not From on High” (2003)
“WO” “Words, Wish, Worth: Wordsworth” (1979)
“WR” “Wordsworth” (1969)
“WT” “ Wounded Time: The Holocaust, Jedwabne, and Disaster Writing” (2002)
“WV” “Witnessing Video Testimony” (interview by Jennifer Ballengee)
(2001)
“WW” “Words and Wounds” (1980)
