Geoffrey Hartman
Outstanding literary critic who helped to gather Holocaust testimony
EOFFREYHARTMAN was one of the outstanding literary critics of the past 50 years. Mainly based at Yale University, he wrote on Romanticism, Literary Theory and increasingly on Judaism, playing a key role in establishing the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale.
He was part of that generation of Jewish literary critics that included George Steiner, Harold Bloom and Jacques Derrida. His grandfather taught Religious Studies at the noted Philantropien Jewish school in Frankfurt and his father was a businessman.
In 1939, at the age of nine, Hartman came to Britain as an unaccompanied child refugee with the Kindertransport. His mother went to the United States, his father to Argentina and a grandmother died at Terezin. Educated at Aylesbury Grammar School, he was reunited with his mother in New York after the war.
In 1949 he graduated from Queens College in New York and in 1953 was awarded a PhD at Yale. He was taught by key European critics like Rene Wellek and Henri Peyre and came across leading European thinkers like Husserl, Hegel and Martin Buber. It was a curious intellectual formation in 1950s America where English-speaking New Criticism reigned supreme. Jewishness was very much on the margins. As he later wrote in his memoir, A Scholar’s Tale (2007), “In 1955, even a purely cultural interest in Judaism was merely tolerated by Yale’s distinctive, if quietly assumed, Christian ethos.” At Yale, he became a pre-eminent critic of the Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth. Hartman was an important part of the Romantic revival movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1964 he published Wordsworth’s Poetry (1787-1814), his first major book on the poet. Essays followed: Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays (1958-1970) and The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (1975).
Around 1970 Hartman encountered French literary theorist Jacques Derrida. During these years Yale became the centre of the Theory revolution in Anglo-American universities. Hartman, Paul de Man and J Hillis Miller taught there and Derrida was a visiting professor. Hartman wrote influential essays on literary theory and contributed to Deconstruction and Criticism (1979) which established the so-called Yale School. “Graduate students and even undergraduates flocked to Derrida’s lectures, however lengthy and difficult. De Man, Hillis Miller, Harold Bloom, and Shoshana Felman generated a buzz that spread beyond their university.”
Hartman also became interested in Freud and psychoanalysis in this period. In 1978 he edited an influential collection of essays, Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text, which included his own essay, Psychoanalysis: The French Connection.
A final major turning point in his career came around 1980. His colleague Paul De Man died. Two others, Derrida and J Hillis Miller, left Yale for the University of California. Hartman became increasingly involved in Judaism and modern Jewish history. He called it his “turn from Wordsworth, the Romantic poets, and reflections on the function and style of literary criticism to a focus on catastrophic trauma, the Holocaust, and the collective memory”. In 1981 he started teaching Judaic Studies at Yale and helped found the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. In 1986 he edited a collection of essays on the Holocaust and memory and co-edited a very different collection, Midrash and Literature. Ten years later, he wrote The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust.
In 2007 Hartman published his final work, A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe. The tone is very different from his earlier books. It was a deeply personal meditation on his early life and especially his formative experience as a Jewish refugee. He wrote: “A dear friend has suggested that the change of focus in my work was an attempt to repair a discontinuity in my life. I cannot deny it.” He went on: “How could I, in any case, ‘integrate’ the destruction I barely escaped? The shadow of the Holocaust – waylays me like the sudden darkness of a storm in the middle of a sunny day.”
In many ways Geoffrey Hartman’s career reflected the culture around him over 50 years: the gentile humanism of Cold War America, the excitement of literary theory, the explosion of interest in the Holocaust and Jewishness in the 1980s and 90s. But through it all he was one of the great literary critics of his time and perhaps the greatest interpreter of Wordsworth and English Romanticism of the postwar period.
He is survived by his wife, Renée, and his children Liz and David. Born Frankfurt Am Main, Germany, August 11, 1929. Died Hamden, Connecticut, March 14, 2016, aged 86