Review of Geoffrey Hartman's "Scholar's Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Oscar Wilde once declared that “literary criticism is the only civilized form of autobiography,” and Geoffrey Hartman has obviously taken this apothegm to heart. Closely associated with Yale University for most of his professional life, Hartman is one of the most well-known literary critics in the United States, and often identified with the Yale school of deconstruction, even though no overarching methodology can be applied to the entire body of his work.

First, a word on the audience at which this book is aimed: it will be of little interest for most readers who are not at least moderately familiar with the last fifty years of literary criticism in Europe, and especially the American upending thereof in the 1970s and 1980s. The title of the book both is and is not a bit of self-conscious omphaloskepsis: while Hartman does a lot of name-dropping, he discusses many of those names in detail, or at least as much detail as a 180-page book could. Those particularly interested in Hartman’s contributions to Holocaust studies, memorial studies, and digitization will certainly find something interesting. 

Born in 1929 in Germany, Hartman was taken via Kindertransport to England until the end of World War II, when he was able to move to the United States to pursue his education. While he was doing his graduate work at Yale, and later when he was a professor there, he met a number of important people in the field, including but not limited to Paul de Man, Hans Robert Jauss, Derrida, Harold Bloom, Rene Wellek, and Erich Auerbach. Instead of turning his formidable power as analyst and critic toward himself, he looks at their ideas and offers the occasional insight of them as people, including passionate defenses of both de Man and Jauss against accusations concerning their questionable pasts. The book ends with a beautiful tribute to the German critic Erich Auerbach, whose “Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature” is one of the most important contributions to the genre. 

Beyond these occasional coruscations, we get precious few glimpses into his inner life, which is perhaps what many readers might want. But this wouldn’t be the first time in his life that he bucked a trend. The material in the book is wholly refracted through scholarly apparatus and his contribution to it, and therefore comes across as more aloof and impersonal. Hartman is a gentle, avuncular soul with a capacious intellect. His call for the continued close reading of literature is a vital one, as is his continuing suspicion of literary fads like postmodernism, in its all sundry incarnations. I recommend it for those interested in a meditative account of a life in reading and learning, both of which Hartman does with a considerable joie de vivre.