The critic explicitly acknowledges his dependence on prior words that make his word a kind of answer. He calls to other texts "that they might answer him."'
Geoffrey Hartman is the first book devoted to an exploration of the intellectual poetry' of the critic who, whether or not he represents the future of the profession', is a unique and major voice in twentieth-century criticism.
Professor Atkins explains clearly Hartman's key ideas and places his work in the contexts of Romanticism and Judaism on which he has written extensively. In Geoffrey Hartman he provides a valuable introduction to a major critical voice who has called into question our assumptions about the distinction between commentary and imaginative literature.

Atkins, G. Douglas

Editor's Foreword, Preface, Acknowledgments, Abbreviations of Hartman's texts, 1. Reading Hartman, 2. A matter of relation, a question of place: Hartman and contemporary criticism, 3. The Wandering Jew: Hartman's relation to Judaism and Romanticism, 4. Calling voices out of silence: criticism as echo-chamber, 5. 'Dying into the life of recollection': the burden of artistic vocation, 6. Estranging the familiar: Hartman and the essay, or the cat Geoffrey at pranks, 7. It's about time: negative hermeneutics and the fate of reading, Appendix I, Appendix II, Notes, Index