HARTMAN, GEOFFREY H.

born Aug. 11, 1929, Frankfurt-am-Main, Ger. German-born American literary critic and theorist who opposed Formalism and championed criticism as a creative act. In his writing, noted for its difficulty, he maintained that the greatest writing is infinitely interpretable. Hartman immigrated to the United States in 1946 and became a U.S. citizen later that year. After studying at Queens College, New York City (B.A., 1949); the University of Dijon, France; and Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (Ph.D., 1953), he embarked on a university teaching career, most of it (195562 and since 1967) at Yale. In his first book, The Unmediated Vision (1954), he argued that poetry mediates between its readers and direct experience, much as religion did in more religious eras. Romantic poetry especially interested him; he wrote several books on William Wordsworth, including Wordsworth's Poetry, 17871814 (1964; rev. ed., 1971) and The Unremarkable Wordsworth (1987), and edited a collection of Wordsworth's writings entitled Selected Poetry and Prose (1970). In his essay collection The Fate of Reading (1975), Hartman argued that history, like literature, is open to many interpretations and therefore is also a kind of critical energy. In Criticism in the Wilderness (1980) he called for uniting the studies of literature, history, and philosophy and disputed the common notion of criticism as a form separate from and inferior to creative writing. Among his later writings are Easy Pieces (1985), Minor Prophecies (1991), The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (1996), and The Fateful Question of Culture (1997). He became project director of the Video Archive of Holocaust Testimonies in 1982.