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What Remains: Geoffrey Hartman and the Shock of Imagination1This essay is a shortened and modified version of Chapter 3 of my Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), and appears here with the kind permission of Fordham University Press. Issue 2 (October 2015)
Record Type:
Journal Article
Title:
What Remains: Geoffrey Hartman and the Shock of Imagination1This essay is a shortened and modified version of Chapter 3 of my Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), and appears here with the kind permission of Fordham University Press. Issue 2 (October 2015)
Main Title:
What Remains: Geoffrey Hartman and the Shock of Imagination1This essay is a shortened and modified version of Chapter 3 of my Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), and appears here with the kind permission of Fordham University Press.
<abstract> <title> <x content-type="archive" xml:space="preserve">Abstract</x> </title> <p>This essay examines ways in which Geoffrey Hartman's classic study <italic>Wordsworth's Poetry</italic> (1964) troubles the notion of the imagination as an integral identity or power. Despite his book's famous identification of the apocalyptic imagination with self-consciousness, Hartman makes legible the possibility that self-consciousness is a reaction formation to something akin to an experience of shock. Far from being an exaggerated instance of the egoistic sublime or of so-called Romantic ideology, this violent, haunted, and rhetorically complex imagination operates on the near side of trauma and seems in its most intense manifestations a non-human, even non-animate force.</p> </abstract>