Geoffrey Hartman

"The critic explicitly acknowledges his dependence on prior words that make his word a kind of answer. He calls to other texts that they might answer him.'" Geoffrey Hartman is the first book devoted to an exploration of the "intellectual poetry" of the critic who, whether or not he "represents the future of the profession," is a unique and major voice in twentieth-century criticism. Though he resists easy formulation and cannot be identified with any thoeretical position, Hartman has been developing a sophisticated philosophical criticism that at once parallels and differs from New Criticism, hermeneutics, reader-response, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis, and may best be described as reader-responsibility. Professor Atkins considers the entire range of Hartman's work, from his seminal studies of Wordsworth to his provocative arguments for a "negative hermeneutics" and a "creative criticism", from his continuing efforts to reinvigorate literary history to his "easy pieces" on Alfred Hitchcock, Ross MacDonald, and others. This book explains clearly Hartman's key ideas and places his work in the contexts of Romanticism and Judaism on which he has written extensively. Geoffrey Hartman provides a valuable introduction to a major critical voice of the twentieth century, who, more than any other writer, has called into question our assumptions about the distinction between commentary and imaginative literature.