Geoffrey Hartman: Romanticism after the Holocaust

This comprehensive account demonstrates how Hartman's commitment to the potency of aesthetic mediation informs a similar position in current debates about ethics, media, and memory. "Geoffrey Hartman: Romanticism after the Holocaust" offers the first comprehensive critical account of the work of the American literary critic Geoffrey Hartman. The book aims to achieve two things: first, it charts the whole trajectory of Hartman's career (now more than half a century long) while playing close attention to the place of his career in broader cultural and intellectual contexts; second, it engages with contemporary discussions about ecology, ethics, trauma, the media, and community in order to argue that Hartman's work presents a surprisingly consistent and original position in current debates in literary and cultural studies. Vermeulen identifies a persistent belief in the potency of aesthetic mediation at the heart of Hartman's project, and shows how his work repeatedly reasserts that belief in the face of institutional, cultural and intellectual factors that seem to deny the singular importance of literature. The book allows Hartman to emerge as a major literary thinker whose relevance extends far beyond the domains of Romanticism, of literary theory, and of trauma studies.

Table of Contents:
Abbreviations \ Introduction: Romanticism after Trauma\ 1. Counter-Spirits: Immediacy, History, Nature \ 2. Of Climatology: Literature after Structure \ 3. Memorial Mimesis: The Ecology of Literary Knowledge 4. Grave Immunity: Poetry and the Preservation of Loss \ 5. ‘Darkness makes abode': Mourning, Testimony, Community \ Coda: Wordsworth after the Holocaust \ Works Cited

About the Author :
Pieter Vermeulen is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Stockholm University, Sweden.

Review :
"The remarkable story of later twentieth-century American literary criticism is only beginning to be accorded the fine-grained attention it deserves. Geoffrey Hartman is one of the major figures in that history. In this wide-ranging book, Pieter Vermeulen expertly unpacks the subtleties of Hartman's 'Wordsworthian' engagement with the disaster of modernity, demonstrating how and why Hartman's work affirms the resilience of the literary imagination within a media-saturated culture. Although certain 'scars of the spirit' never heal, Hartman's oeuvre offers us the example of a critic who hangs listening in the archive, keeping faith with loss and grief, yet attuned to past and future potentialities.' Geoffrey Hartman: Romanticism after the Holocaust is a skilful, detailed and methodical critical approach that treats Hartman's changeability as the reason for further investigation and not an excuse for avoidance. It manages to offer another dimension and reinvigorate Hartman's work with an insightful, systematic reading that attends to agreements and disagreements.