Special Issue: About Geoffrey Hartman: Materials for a Study of Intellectual Influence
Edited by Frances Ferguson and Kevis Goodman

Thirty-one authors included in the pages of this issue select one passage from Hartman’s work that they have found particularly generative and offer a brief reading of it—whether to comment on its significance for their own or others’ scholarship, to think about its place among Hartman’s critical passions and interests, or to discuss its influence in the critical landscapes of the past or the present. The result is a kind of florilegium-with-commentaries. Each piece is thus very short; each starts with an excerpt from Hartman’s prose (or in one case poetry) and then unfolds from there, so that his voice threads in and out of ours, drawing together critics with very different interests and relationships to Hartman’s own work, as well as quite various understandings of it. As befits Hartman—who was the student of Erich Auerbach, Rene Wellek, and Henri Peyre, who made his home and career in the United States, but who first became famous as a reader of England’s William Wordsworth—this collection is also an international collaboration: scholars from Germany, Belgium,

England, and Israel here join others writing from all across America.