
Scars of the Spirit
The Struggle Against Inauthenticity
Geoffrey H. Hartman(Author)
St Martin's Press
Published on 17. August 2002
Book
Hardback
272 pages
978-0-312-29569-1 (ISBN)
Description
In this collection of essays, critic Geoffrey Hartman raises the essential question of where we can find the real or authentic in the contemporary world, and how this affects the way we can understand our human predicament. Hartman explores such issues as the fantasy of total and perfect information available on the internet, the biographical excesses of tell-all daytime talk shows, and how we can understand what is "true" in biographical and testimonial writing. And, what, he asks, is the ethical point of all this personal testimony? What has it really taught us? Underlying the entire book is a question of how the Holocaust has shaped the possibilities for truth and for the writing of an authentic life story in the contemporary world, and how we can approach the world in a meaningful way. Hartman produces a meditation on how an appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of art and writing may help us to answer these questions of meaning. His idea is that the form of contemplation produced by the aesthetic, and particularly by poetry resists both the fantasy of data delivering up its own final meaning and of ideology delivering us from literature and life.
Reviews / Votes
'Hartman carefully shows us how reading can lead us to our authentic selves, and away from a 'disenchantment that is final.' - Publishers Weekly 'Hartman successfully recasts some of our basic questions...[so] that we understand our human predicament' - Library Journal '...a profound recognition of the weight and value that words can have.' - Los Angeles Times 'In 13 personal essays, Hartman examines the interaction between life and art, focussing on concerns about the authentic.' - W.F.Williams, Choice 'Hartman is first and foremost an essayist with an appetite for the suggestive detail and a taste for indirection.' - Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative LiteratureMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 244 mm
Width: 168 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
538 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-312-29569-1 (9780312295691)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
GEOFFREY HARTMAN is a noted literary critic, Sterling Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Holocaust video testimony project at Yale. He left Germany as a child as part of the kindertransport.
Content
Acknowledgments Foreword Triple Overture: Dangerous Good Words A Short History of the Unreal Remnants of Hegel Realism, Authenticity, and the New Biographical Culture Tele-Suffering and Testimony Testimony and Authenticity The Letter as Revenant Text and Spirit Transparency Reconsidered Who Needs Goethe? The Virtue of Attentiveness Democracy's Museum Aestheticid