Geoffrey Hartman

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Geoffrey H. Hartman (born August 11, 1929 in Frankfurt am Main ; † March 14, 2016 in Hamden , Connecticut ) was a German-American literary scholar and Sterling Professor at Yale University . He is considered one of the most important philologists of his generation.

Life

Geoffrey Hartman was born into the Jewish Hartmann family in 1929. In 1939 Hartman came to England on one of the last Kindertransporte and spent the time at Waddesdon Manor until the end of the war . In 1946 he followed his mother to New York , changed his name to "Hartman" and became an American citizen.

In 1949 Hartman graduated from Queens College in New York with a bachelor's degree in comparative literature . From 1951 to 1952 he studied on a Fulbright scholarship in Dijon . In 1953 he received his doctorate from Yale University on William Wordsworth , Hopkins , Rilke and Valéry . After two years in the US Army , he worked from 1955 to 1962 as a lecturer and assistant professor at Yale. In the following years he taught at the University of Chicago , the University of Iowa and Cornell University , among others , before returning to Yale University in 1967. His lecture “ Structuralism and Literary Studies”, given in 1966 at the Institute for General and Comparative Literature Studies at the Free University of Berlin , caused a sensation , through which “the rumor called structuralism became tangible for the first time and at the same time the vast world of theory was imported into Germany”. In 1972 Hartman was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Since 2000 he has been a corresponding member of the British Academy .

His best-known books include Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787–1814 (1964), Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (1980), The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (1996), and his memoirs, A Scholar's Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe (2007). From 1979, under his leadership, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies was created , a video archive in which the memories of more than 4000 survivors of the Holocaust were collected.

Hartman died at his Hamden, Connecticut home in March 2016, aged 86.

Works (selection)

  • The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke, and Valéry (1954)
  • André Malraux (1960)
  • Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814 (1964)
  • Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry. Essays in Honor of Frederic Pottle. New Haven 1965.
  • Beyond Formalism (1970)
  • The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (1975)
  • Deconstruction and Criticism (1979)
  • Criticism in the Wilderness (1980)
  • Saving the Text: Literature / Derrida / Philosophy (1981)
  • Easy Pieces (1985)
  • The Unremarkable Wordsworth (1987)
  • Minor Prophecies: The Literary Essay in the Culture Wars (1991)
  • The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (1996).
    • German: The longest shadow: remembering and forgetting after the Holocaust . Construction Verlag, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-351-02488-6 .
  • The Fateful Question of Culture (1997)
    • The eloquent silence of literature: About the discomfort with culture . Translation by Frank Jakubzik . Berlin: Suhrkamp, ​​2000
  • A Critic's Journey: Literary Reflections, 1958-1998 (1999)
  • Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity (2004)
  • A Scholar's Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe (2007)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas Meyer: Geoffrey Hartman died . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 23, 2016, p. 12.
  2. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed June 7, 2020 .

Remarks

  1. ↑ His middle name H. does not stand for a first name, see the obituary of the New York Times of March 20, 2016: In a curious augury for one whose life would center on signification, his middle initial stood for nothing.
personal data
SURNAME Hartman, Geoffrey
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hartman, Geoffrey H. (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American literary scholar and Sterling Professor at Yale University
DATE OF BIRTH August 11, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main
DATE OF DEATH March 14, 2016
Place of death Hamden , Connecticut