The study of English literature, and literary studies more broadly, was, for the greater part of the 20th century, the crown jewel of the humanities. And from the early 1960s until his death last month, at the age of 86, Geoffrey Hartman was one of its staunchest guardians.
But with rampant austerity measures at American universities and the growing influence of anti-intellectualism, the position of the humanities today is far more precarious than it was between the 1960s and 1980s, when Hartman was doing his most innovative work. His contribution is remarkable and substantial, and his life and work offer a warning against the direction that the humanities is taking — aggressively — in the 21st century.
That Hartman became a giant in his field makes it easy to forget his beginnings. After escaping Nazi Germany as a young boy on a Kindertransport, Hartman, separated from his family, resided with other evacuated children at the Buckinghamshire country estate of James de Rothschild for the rest of World War II. After the war, Hartman was reunited with his mother, who had escaped to New York City. There he earned a B.A. from Queens College in 1949 and went on to receive a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Yale University in 1953. He taught English literature and comparative literature at Cornell University, the University of Iowa, and Yale University.
Hartman’s choice to specialize in the Romantic poets was unusual. For in the 1950s, indeed well into the 1960s, modernist Anglophiles like T.S. Eliot were busy portraying the Romantics as puerile and unsophisticated. By the 1970s, however, the scholarly reputation of the Romantics had been largely overturned, in part due to the efforts of Hartman, along with M.H. Abrams, Harold Bloom, Northrop Frye, and others. For Hartman, this new respect for the Romantics meant above all new esteem for the poetry of his beloved William Words- worth, whom he first read as a refugee in the English countryside.
It is not discovery but utility that is increasingly the focal point in higher education.
For his part in rescuing the reputation of the Romantics, Hartman made an enormous contribution to the study of English literature, and by extension the humanities. In other academic circles, he is known as a literary theorist, particularly for his work in the 1970s with deconstruction. In still other circles, he is celebrated for his role in establishing Yale’s Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies and as a scholar of trauma.
But any story of Geoffrey Hartman’s life and work should speak not only of his manifold gifts to the humanities. The story ought to also explore the ways that the humanities were as generous to Hartman as Hartman was to them. Indeed, through all his seemingly disparate undertakings, he was supported by institutions and a culture that nourished his wandering path of learning.
In the early 1960s, Hartman and his friend Paul de Man helped establish Cornell’s comparative-literature program with funding from the National Defense Education Act, the mission of which, recalls Stanley Corngold, one of de Man’s graduate students at Cornell, was to “strengthen the American aerospace engineering plant, with Congress once again choosing to define this project as more generally humane than that of mobilizing hard-science technologies.” It is difficult to imagine the U.S. government funding such a venture today. And not only public but private agencies were willing to contribute large sums to support “humane” purposes. In 1966 the Ford Foundation awarded around $30,000 to the Johns Hopkins University for an international symposium on structuralism.
Hartman and his colleagues were fortunate to work in an environment in which generous funds for the arts and humanities were awarded with frequency. But the environment offered more than financial support — it offered space for the exploration of unplanned and unexpected avenues of research. For example, the Johns Hopkins symposium on structuralism facilitated a conversation between Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, who met by happenstance over breakfast. Their discovery that they were both interested in a little-studied text by Rousseau launched one of the most important intellectual friendships of the late 20th century and contributed to the advance of deconstruction in America.
Hartman himself understood his life and work as a chain of fortunate contingencies. He began his 2007 intellectual self-portrait with a telling quote from Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude: “Who knows the individual hour in which / His habits were first sown, even as a seed, / Who that shall point as with a wand, and say / ‘This portion of the river of my mind / Came from yon fountain?’” Like everyone else’s, Hartman’s path was unpredictable, and mappable only in retrospect. Yet our current academic climate hardly supports this principle. When we look back at the era of postwar prosperity, specifically the funding for higher education, and juxtapose it with the contemporary climate of austerity, Hartman’s life and work emerge as an example for us all. Might there still be a way for us to drift into our identities, as Hartman felt he had?
Such drifting, which requires a reciprocity between individual and institution, is what nurtures and fosters groundbreaking work. Where I live, in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker has said, “Maybe it’s time for faculty and staff to start thinking about teaching more classes and doing more work.” The sentiment that academics do not work enough is a disturbing trend amongst some of our politicians and even university administrators. But what is also deeply problematic is that they don’t seem to understand what an academic’s work is, and how that work is done.
For most academics, there is a necessary and meaningful interplay between work and leisure. The engineer George de Mestral discovered Velcro while on a hunting trip. William James’s harrowing experience hiking transformed his views on the psychology of religion. Perhaps Nietzsche was right when he said that all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.
Unfortunately, it is not discovery but utility that is increasingly the focal point in higher education, as value becomes synonymous with financial worth. In its 2015 report on the state of the humanities, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences acknowledged that recent discourse on the health of the humanities has “tended to prioritize the economic value of the degrees over the broader social value of the skills and knowledge imparted.” Many of us in the humanities feel the pressure to connect our research with STEM fields or to otherwise prove its relevance in a culture in which disciplines like literary studies are no longer regarded as inherently valuable.
When I interviewed Harold Bloom in 2013 for my research on the history of deconstruction in America, he remarked that in the 1970s, literary scholars were caught up in internecine ideological battles over critical methods. To them it might have felt as if the whole world hung on the question of a Lacanian versus a Marxist interpretation of “The Purloined Letter.” But, Bloom noted, the real peril lay just on the horizon, a threat that would put the entire mission of literary studies in danger. Geoffrey Hartman and his cohort were of a generation of scholars who could indulge themselves in what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences,” relatively ignorant of the looming existential threat.
During one of the several afternoons I spent with him for my research, Hartman recalled to me that when he was a child in the English countryside, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth “fell into” him. “All I can say about this,” he mused, “is that I did not wish actively to learn this poetry by heart; I wanted it to fall into me, to become a part of my being; and I often made up and received to myself ordinary matters in blank verse.”
It occurred to me that he carried that disposition, this way of living and thinking, through his adult life. And he was able to do so in part thanks to the space and time allowed him by academic life. Could it be that on our horizon is a future in which the study of literature is no longer a vocation accessible to any but the most privileged? With the death of Geoffrey Hartman, we have lost a person whose way of moving through the world is worth supporting by fostering institutional conditions more favorable to wandering. For sometimes our best ideas and most important connections occur at the margins.
Gregory Jones-Katz is a Ph.D. candidate in modern U.S. intellectual and cultural history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
