Geoffrey Hartman

Geoffrey Hartman
Born	Geoffrey H. Hartmann (1929-08-11)August 11, 1929 Frankfurt, Germany
Died	March 14, 2016(2016-03-14) (aged 86) IHamden, Connecticut, U.S.
Education	Queens College, CUNY (B.A.) Yale University (Ph.D.)
Occupation	Literary critic
Known for	Yale school, Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies

Geoffrey H. Hartman (August 11, 1929 – March 14, 2016) was a German-born American literary theorist, sometimes identified with the Yale School of deconstruction, but who also wrote on a wide range of subjects, and cannot be categorized by a single school or method. Hartman spent most of his career in the comparative literature department at Yale University, where he also founded the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies

Biography

Geoffrey H. Hartmann was born in Frankfurt am Main in Germany, in an Ashkenazi Jewish family. In 1939 he left Germany for England as an unaccompanied Kindertransport child refugee, sent away by his family to escape the Nazi regime. He came to the United States in 1946, where he was reunited with his mother, and later became an American citizen. Upon arrival in the US, his mother changed the family surname to "Hartman" to obscure its Germanic origin.

Hartman attended Queens College, City University of New York and received his PhD from Yale. After appointments at the University of Iowa and Cornell in the 1950s, Hartman returned to Yale and was eventually made Sterling Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University. One of his long-term interests was the English poet William Wordsworth.

His work explored the distinction between literature and literary commentator. He helped found the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale's Sterling Memorial Library, and lectured on issues dealing with the production and implications of testimony.

Bibliography

• 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)
• "Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1976-77" (1978) editor
• Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (1980)
• Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (1981)
• Easy Pieces (1985)
• Midrash and Literature (1986, editor)
• 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)
• A Scholar's Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe (2007)

See also

• List of deconstructionists

External links

• Hartman bibliography
• For a review of Hartman's memoirs, see Balint, Benjamin (May 22, 2008). "From Frankfurt to New Haven". The Forward.