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PARTISAN REVIEW
A CRITICAL GARDEN
CRITICISM IN THE WILDERNESS: THE STUDY OF LITERATURE
TODAY. 8y GeoHrey Hartman.
Yale University Press. $18.
Geoffrey Hartman is widely recognized as a superb reader
of poetry, but he has always been interested in theories of reading
and as much fascinated by critical theory as by critical practice. An
early work,
The Unmediated Vision
(1954), which influenced a whole
generation of graduate students to value the "purity" of the poetic
vision, was nonetheless offered as a "contribution to that empirical
discourse of method still lacking in the fine arts." Two subsequent
collections of essays,
Beyond Formalism
(1970) and
The Fate
oj
Reading
(1975), although containing the usual fare of brilliant explications of
poetry, were increasingly laden with reflections on the place of lit–
erary criticism in the humanities and the political function of
humanistic studies in modern society. Hartman is a generous
scholar, always ready to pay tribute and graciously admit his debt to
other critics; he is a good citizen of the intellectual community in
every sense.
In
recent years, however, he has had to bear a lot of
hostile heat, as he stepped up his claims for the place of theory in lit–
erary interpretation and, under the inspiration of Derrida, given
vent to his extraordinary talents as a prose stylist in his own critical
writings. Now, in
Criticism in the Wilderness,
Hartman strikes back.
He does so with wit, good humor, and commendable tact; but his
counterattack is sharply polemical and the thrust of his argument
consistently aggressive. His aim is to establish the legitimacy of
theory in literary criticism (as against what might be called the ideol–
ogy of taste that normally prevails as the critic's
doxa)
and to deter–
mine the extent to which criticism can claim a "creativity" every bit
as original as the art about which it speaks.
Hartman's argument is based on an interpretation of the history
of literary criticism since the romantic period.
In
his version, the
romantics tended to fuse literature and philosophy, which made
them receptive to theoretical considerations in the making of their
art, and to conflate rather than to separate poetry and prose, which
allowed them to aspire to as much creativity in their critical writings
as in their lyrics. Novalis, Friedrich von Schlegel, Coleridge, and
Carlyle wrote criticism in the mode of "severe intellectual poems,"
