A Scholar's Tale Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe Geoffrey Hartman $24.95 ISBN: 9780823228324 Book (Hardcover) Fordham University Press 160 pages October 2007 Quantity:

"A genuine rarity; this kind of intellectual autobiography scarcely exists in this country."—New York Sun "[A] lucid and intriguing autobiographical memoir."—London Review of Books "The journey detailed here is at once intensely personal and curiously remote." —American Book Review "Most serious students of modern literary criticism should recognize the work of Hartman, whose The Geoffrey Hartman Reader recently won the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism in Honor of Newton Arvin. During his 50-plus years as a literary critic and professor, Hartman has written thoughtful, provocative, and lasting opinions on the literary world. His many years of reading and close friendships with contemporaries Erich Auerbach, Harold Bloom, Paul de Mann, and Jacques Derrida offer a lively overview of trends in American literature and have helped shape literary criticism as a study. But perhaps Hartman’s greatest contribution to the academic world is his work recording the stories of Holocaust survivors (he is project director of the Fortunoff Video for Holocaust Testimonies). Having himself left Nazi Germany at age nine, his point of view is passionate, compassionate, and elegant. Recommended for all academic libraries and where interest warrants in public libraries."—Library Journal "In the first several pages of this remarkable volume, Hartman immediately plunges the reader into his literary and referential universe by alluding to such disparate notables as John Crowe Ransom, William Wordsworth, John Milton, Mel Gibson, and Eva Hoffman. Intertextual references abound throughout, providing a glimpse into the author's learned, searching mind. He recounts his own escape from the Nazis on a Kindertransport in 1939, connecting that event to the literary scholar he became. Hartman devotes most of his memoir to his intellectual journey--from his romance with the Romantic poets and new criticism to his experimentation with other theoretical approaches and eventual turn to Holocaust and genocide studies. Along the way, he recounts his years at Yale; his friendships with Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Erich Auerbach; and the evolution of his own approach to literary interpretation, which, perforce, constitutes the trajectory of 20th-century literary history. Rather than chapter titles, the book includes sidebar summaries that guide the reader through the sometimes dizzying and pithy reflections on German philosophy, deconstruction, academic politics, cultural studies, Marxism, and Judaic studies. Highly recommended."—Choice “Illuminates the evolution of a career at some of the most exciting and volatile moments in literary studies in the United States in the last half of the century. . . . Its erudition and intellectual range and curiosity are absolutely astounding. . . . An invaluable record and a moving book.”—Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University For more than fifty years, Geoffrey Hartman has been a pivotal figure in the humanities. In his first book, in 1954, he helped establish the study of Romanticism as key to the problems of modernity. Later, his writings were crucial to the explosive developments in literary theory in the late seventies, and he was a pioneer in Jewish studies, trauma studies, and studies of the Holocaust. At Yale, he was a founder of its Judaic Studies program, as well as of the first major video archive for Holocaust testimonies. Generations of students have benefited from Hartman’s generosity, his penetrating and incisive questioning, the wizardry of his close reading, and his sense that the work of a literary scholar, no less than that of an artist, is a creative act. All these qualities shine forth in this intellectual memoir, which will stand as his autobiography. Hartman describes his early education, uncanny sense of vocation, and development as a literary scholar and cultural critic. He looks back at how his career was influenced by his experience, at the age of nine, of being a refugee from Nazi Germany in the Kindertransport. He spent the next six years at school in England, where he developed his love of English literature and the English countryside, before leaving to join his mother in America. Hartman treats us to a “biobibliography” of his engagements with the major trends in literary criticism. He covers the exciting period at Yale handled so controversially by the media and gives us vivid portraits, in particular, of Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. All this is set in the context of his gradual self-awareness of what scholarship implies and how his personal displacements strengthened his calling to mediate between European and American literary cultures. Anyone looking for a rich, intelligible account of the last half-century of combative literary studies will want to read Geoffrey Hartman’s unapologetic scholar’s tale. GEOFFREY HARTMAN is Sterling Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Yale, and Project Director of its Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. His most recent books are The Geoffrey Hartman Reader (Fordham), winner of the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism in Honor of Newton Arvin; Scars of the Spirit; The Longest Shadow; and a new edition of Criticism in the Wilderness.

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