BOOKS
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beginning in the welcoming circle of postwar emigre scholars at Yale,
featuring above all for Hartman, the figure of Eric Auerbach, also a
German Jewish emigre. Auerbach's Jewishness (Hartman is quick to
add) "did not define his intellectual character in any obvious way....
lHe] was totally assimilated into German and European culture." A few
pages identify three origins of Hartman's "journey" to prominence as a
literary critic-prewar Jewish Germany, England, and Yale-but with–
out exploration of the complex and surely troubled relationships of loss
and substitution among them.
By discarding chronological sequence in the arrangement of essays,
A
Critic's Journey
leaves out personal matters, even within the period of
Hartman's mature career. Under the book's first rubric, "Theory," two
essays from the] 990S ("Tea and Totality" and "The Philomela Pro–
ject") are interwoven with two from 1980 ("Understanding Criticism"
and "The Voice of the Shuttle") . The anthology offers none of his writ–
ing from 1953 to 1964, the phenomenally productive period which
included his first book,
The Unmediated Vision
(1953), and the monu–
mental
Wordsworth's Poetry
(1964). Only four of the essays date from
the 1970s, so that Hartman's passage from Auerbach's Yale to that of
Paul de Man and "Derridadism" (Hartman's coinage) remains obscure.
The two essays from
Beyond Formalism
(1970), "Milton's Counter–
plot," and "False Themes and Gentle Minds," display the sustained and
probing interpretations of specific literary texts and issues in literary
history that brought Hartman his early reputation as critic and scholar.
Most of the nineteen essays, however, are from the f980s and early '90S,
and range over many topics, such as popular film, Shakespeare, Scrip–
ture, and identity politics in American higher education.
Had Hartman put his essays into chronological order, his shift from
confidently challenging entrenched Anglo-American critical traditions
to somewhat more diffidently defending art and humanistic study
would be more apparent. For both periods, the book's formal divisions:
"Theory," "Cases," and "Speculations" awkwardly substitute quasi–
logical for chronological markers; in most of these essays, Hartman
brings theory and speculation to bear on every textual "case," while at
the same time embedding abstractions in the linguistic particularity of
the texts he quotes. Hartman's merging of theory, textual examples, and
speculation makes even the term "critic" oddly misleading. For "literary
criticism," as Hartman encountered it in the Yale of the 1950S, is what
early led him to promote the substitute terms "commentary" and
"hermeneutics"-until "criticism" could be liberated from its Anglo–
American fetters.
