Geoffrey Hartman and the Affective Ecology of Romantic Form

Abstract

Geoffrey Hartman has not only been a leading voice in the study of Romanticism, but he has also made a major impact on our understanding of historical trauma and the memory of catastrophe. The combination of these two foci enables Hartman's work to conceptualize a more indirect and subterranean relation between literary form and history than most historicist research paradigms assume. At a time when the historicist paradigms that have long dominated the study of Romanticism are increasingly being challenged by a return to literary form, a number of recent books have taken Hartman's cue in conceiving of Romantic form as a medium that, precisely because it shields the self from the overwhelming and potentially traumatizing impact of history, paradoxically allows history to register as affect. These new approaches differ from the so-called 'new formalism' in that, again like Hartman, they emphasize the phenomenological role of literary form -i.e. the role of form in our affective ecology, or the interanimation of mind and world. While these books are all firmly anchored in Romanticism, they extend the scope of Romantic studies by mobilizing the achievements of Romantic form as a vital modern phenomenon.