Geoffrey H. Hartman

What defines "culture wars"? Can art and literature restore and reconnect us to the world? Or does culture, in the guise of politics, divide and separate us? What is finally at stake in the "culture wars"? In this book Geoffrey H. Hartman explores the varied meanings of culture in a fractured postmodern world. Engaging a wide range of literature and criticism, Hartman considers culture's many uses, generating the subtle yet immense hope that flows from a great artist such as Wordsworth but also the terrible capacity to destroy, as evidenced by the cultural politics of Nazi Germany. Hartman calls for the restoration of literature to its place as the focus of thinking about culture and for the renewal of aesthetic education to help ensure the balance between art, culture, and politics.

"Even the casual reader will notice a strong preoccupation with religion in the work of Northrop Frye. In his latest book, however, the esteemed Frye scholar Robert Denham shows that it played a far greater role than has been assumed - religion was in fact central to practically everything Frye wrote, Denham's focus shifts the emphasis from Anatomy of Criticism, Frye's most famous work, and places it on those works with which Frye began and ended his career - the early Fearful Symmetry and, fifty years later, his two studies of the Bible and The Double Vision. This reevaluation is based on a close examination of Frye's religiously charged language and aided by Denham's remarkable and unique access to Frye's notebooks. The notebooks' contents not only expand on ideas laid out in Frye's published works but also touch on subjects most readers would not associate with Frye, such as his wide reading both in Eastern religious texts and in esoteric traditions ranging from astrology to the Kabbalah."--Jacket.

Distinguished literary scholar Geoffrey H. Hartman, himself forced to leave Germany at age nine, collects his essays, both scholarly and personal, that focus on the Holocaust. Hartman contends that although progress has been made, we are only beginning to understand the horrendous events of 1933 to 1945. The continuing struggle for meaning, consolation, closure, and the establishment of a collective memory against the natural tendency toward forgetfulness is a recurring theme. The many forms of response to the devastation - from historical research and survivors' testimony to the novels, films, and monuments that have appeared over the last fifty years - reflect and inform efforts to come to grips with the past, despite events (like those at Bitburg) that attempt to foreclose it. The stricture that poetry after Auschwitz is "barbaric" is countered by the increased sense of responsibility incumbent on the creators of these works.

"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, 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 inform this intellectual memoir, which will stand as his autobiography. Hartman describes his early education, 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 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 scholar's tale."--Jacket.