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Deconstruction and Criticism
Five essential and challenging essays by leading post-modern theorists on the art and nature of interpretation: Jacques Derrida, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, and J. Hillis Miller.
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First published December 1, 1979
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About the author
Geoffrey H. Hartman
55 books9 followersFrom NYT obituary: Geoffrey H. Hartman, a literary critic whose work took in the Romantic poets, Judaic sacred texts, Holocaust studies, deconstruction and the workings of memory — and took on the very function of criticism itself — died on March 14 at his home in Hamden, Conn. He was 86.
His death was announced by Yale University, where he was the Sterling professor emeritus of English and comparative literature.
Considered one of the world’s foremost scholars of literature, Professor Hartman was associated with the “Yale School,” a cohort of literary theorists that included Harold Bloom, J. Hillis Miller and Paul de Man. Their work was rooted in deconstruction, the approach to analyzing the multilayered relationship between a text and its meaning that was advanced by the 20th-century French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
Professor Hartman was renowned for his vast Continental erudition. His scholarly attention ranged over Wordsworth, to whom he was long devoted; the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins; Judaica (he helped found the Judaic studies program at Yale); Alfred Hitchcock; Freud; detective stories; and the nature of trauma, the memory of trauma and testimony about trauma — interests borne of his own wartime experience — as well as the ways in which traumatic recollections can be filtered through the creative imagination.
Among his best-known books are “Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814” (1964); “Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today” (1980), considered a landmark in the field; “The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust” (1996); and a memoir, “A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe” (2007).
He was the first director of what is now the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale. Begun in 1979, the archive, which is open to the public, comprises more than 4,000 interviews with Holocaust survivors, witnesses and liberators from around the world.
As a result of his association with the Yale School, Professor Hartman was often called a deconstructionist, but his critical stance eluded tidy classification.
Deconstruction maintains that any given text is, below its surface, a roiling system of conflicting semantic signs. As such, the text has no one empirical reading; it is, rather, a network of competing meanings — a quicksilver state of affairs that a critical analysis of that text must take into account.
Early on, Professor Hartman championed this approach. But over time he went deconstruction one better, arguing that a literary text is so pregnant with possible readings that to make an evaluative judgment about it — or even, perhaps, to extract an inventory of its meanings — is futile.
By longstanding tradition, as Professor Hartman reminded his readers, literary criticism was seen as a handmaiden of literature — an adjunct whose sole raison d’être was literature itself.
In “Criticism in the Wilderness,” he argued that criticism should not only stand on an equal footing with literature but also be literature. (Classifying criticism as literature inevitably triggers a hall-of-mirrors effect, the kind of Talmudic paradox that was to Professor Hartman a source of unalloyed delight: If criticism becomes literature, it is thus amenable to critical analysis. How, then, does one classify the criticism that results?)
In elevating criticism to the status of literature, Professor Hartman did not mean merely that it should be well written. What he also meant was that criticism should function for criticism’s sake alone.
“The spectacle of the critic’s mind disoriented, bewildered, caught in some ‘wild surmise’ about the text and struggling to adjust — is not that one of the interests critical writing has for us?” he wrote in “Criticism in the Wilderness.”
He continued: “In more casual acts of reading this bewilderment can be muted, for there is always the hint of a resolution further on, or an enticement to enter for its own
His death was announced by Yale University, where he was the Sterling professor emeritus of English and comparative literature.
Considered one of the world’s foremost scholars of literature, Professor Hartman was associated with the “Yale School,” a cohort of literary theorists that included Harold Bloom, J. Hillis Miller and Paul de Man. Their work was rooted in deconstruction, the approach to analyzing the multilayered relationship between a text and its meaning that was advanced by the 20th-century French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
Professor Hartman was renowned for his vast Continental erudition. His scholarly attention ranged over Wordsworth, to whom he was long devoted; the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins; Judaica (he helped found the Judaic studies program at Yale); Alfred Hitchcock; Freud; detective stories; and the nature of trauma, the memory of trauma and testimony about trauma — interests borne of his own wartime experience — as well as the ways in which traumatic recollections can be filtered through the creative imagination.
Among his best-known books are “Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814” (1964); “Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today” (1980), considered a landmark in the field; “The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust” (1996); and a memoir, “A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe” (2007).
He was the first director of what is now the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale. Begun in 1979, the archive, which is open to the public, comprises more than 4,000 interviews with Holocaust survivors, witnesses and liberators from around the world.
As a result of his association with the Yale School, Professor Hartman was often called a deconstructionist, but his critical stance eluded tidy classification.
Deconstruction maintains that any given text is, below its surface, a roiling system of conflicting semantic signs. As such, the text has no one empirical reading; it is, rather, a network of competing meanings — a quicksilver state of affairs that a critical analysis of that text must take into account.
Early on, Professor Hartman championed this approach. But over time he went deconstruction one better, arguing that a literary text is so pregnant with possible readings that to make an evaluative judgment about it — or even, perhaps, to extract an inventory of its meanings — is futile.
By longstanding tradition, as Professor Hartman reminded his readers, literary criticism was seen as a handmaiden of literature — an adjunct whose sole raison d’être was literature itself.
In “Criticism in the Wilderness,” he argued that criticism should not only stand on an equal footing with literature but also be literature. (Classifying criticism as literature inevitably triggers a hall-of-mirrors effect, the kind of Talmudic paradox that was to Professor Hartman a source of unalloyed delight: If criticism becomes literature, it is thus amenable to critical analysis. How, then, does one classify the criticism that results?)
In elevating criticism to the status of literature, Professor Hartman did not mean merely that it should be well written. What he also meant was that criticism should function for criticism’s sake alone.
“The spectacle of the critic’s mind disoriented, bewildered, caught in some ‘wild surmise’ about the text and struggling to adjust — is not that one of the interests critical writing has for us?” he wrote in “Criticism in the Wilderness.”
He continued: “In more casual acts of reading this bewilderment can be muted, for there is always the hint of a resolution further on, or an enticement to enter for its own
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
March 10, 2025
Strange times we are living in, indeed, when Harold Bloom, that literary curmudgeon, is a comfort read.
October 11, 2024
El libro que hizo que se me despierte una nueva obsesión: Derrida
September 11, 2008
About a hundred pages of this book are full of the essay "Living On: Borderlines," and that essay is as close as philosophy can be to poetry. Your mind feels different when you come out of it, and there's no going back. Of course, as with a poem, anyone who tells you they wholly totally understand it, really, really doesn't.
June 10, 2009
I think Bloom is claiming that one thing that is not deconstructable is his own theory of interpoetic-anxiety. Bloom, of course, has insisted his inclusion in the collection as a personal joke, as revealed in an interview of him in a book of interviews titled Criticism in Society.
November 18, 2009
I had the weird experience (for me) of thinking Derrida's piece to be the least useful, most ponderous of the lot. Many essays read around Shelley's poem The Triumph of Life. To paraphrase Miles Davis, Harold Bloom can write like a m-f-.
October 22, 2019
Este libro no se lee tan fácil y es casi imposible comprenderlo en su totalidad (de hecho esto mismo en sí es un postulado de los críticos que escriben aquí) sin embargo sí me dejó la sensación de entrar a un nuveo mundo, conocer algo distinto y aprecié cada palabra y cada texto.
June 5, 2017
A work against reason. A work to expand the horizons of the adepts and initiates. European (white) quack gurus.
May 1, 2019
Gave up on page 140. I literally couldn’t stop nodding off
January 31, 2023
I think I have to go on with Chomsky on this one.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 5, 2025
li quase até o final do texto "sobreviver", não li nessa edição
July 29, 2009
I think my initial review (when I was about halfway through) has been eaten by cyberspace. no matter. the first half of the book is plodding through Bloom and suffering through de Man (to be honest, with little understanding) until I finally came to the pure joy of Derrida....
(then I finished the rest of the book)
...and a second joy from Derrida with that little band, or note to the translator(s). Then a pleasant surprise from Hartman and Miller. This little book certainly isn't for eceryone, but an essential document on how 'deconstruction' landed here (in the states). And for me privately, I can never have enough Derrida. It's a personal problem and I'm working my way through it. I almost wish the de Man and Bloom had been left out or left to the end, BUT, despite my hatred, the Bloom piece is oft cited throughout the book and the de Man brought Shelley's Triumph of Life into the foreground (more or less), so I suppose they must be included (and for historical accuracy - in a way). Would have been five stars for Derrida, four for Hartman and Miller and one or two for Bloom and de Man - their importance not withstanding...
(then I finished the rest of the book)
...and a second joy from Derrida with that little band, or note to the translator(s). Then a pleasant surprise from Hartman and Miller. This little book certainly isn't for eceryone, but an essential document on how 'deconstruction' landed here (in the states). And for me privately, I can never have enough Derrida. It's a personal problem and I'm working my way through it. I almost wish the de Man and Bloom had been left out or left to the end, BUT, despite my hatred, the Bloom piece is oft cited throughout the book and the de Man brought Shelley's Triumph of Life into the foreground (more or less), so I suppose they must be included (and for historical accuracy - in a way). Would have been five stars for Derrida, four for Hartman and Miller and one or two for Bloom and de Man - their importance not withstanding...
December 20, 2017
has anyone bought this to look smart and actually made it past the forward? just wondering...
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews