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The last half-century study of literature and
romanticism, and of their relation, is unintelligible
without some type of encounter with Geoffrey Hartman
and Harold Bloom. From Shelley's Mythmaking
and Wordsworth's Poetry to The Anxiety of
Influence and The Fate of Reading a
certain form of romanticism is at once summarized and
surpassed. Whether that romanticism is the dominant
form in romantic studies today is precisely a question
that cannot be answered without a serious reading of
both Hartman and Bloom. One might say the same of other
attendant questions, such as whether there is such a
thing as literature itself, as opposed to culture,
history, or religion; and whether there is such a thing
as the human, as opposed to the post-human or the
Other, or to language or nature or Yahweh. These are
big questions, of course; if we know them also to be
romantic ones, that is because of Hartman and
Bloom.
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It's obviously also a mistake to list simply
critical works of the two from the 1960s and 70s, and
to imagine that as the high water mark of their
engagement with romanticism, or literature, for that
matter. (See also
Bloom's comment about the relation between his latest
book, Jesus and Yahweh , and The Anxiety
of Influence.) They have both written several
careers worth of scholarship since then, and in no way
seem to be slowing down their critical production as
the first decade of the twenty-first century works
toward its conclusion. Hence this present volume of
Romantic Circles Praxis. Earlier interviews of
romanticists in RCP have conceived of
themselves as cameos; this volume might appropriately
use more modernist language and present itself as a set
of snapshots of each scholar, catching them less in
repose and more in the active process of continuing two
storied, foundational careers.
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If these are snapshots, they capture the two in
different settings and modes of inquiry. The interview
with Geoffrey Hartman was conducted last August in the
lobby of the conference hotel for the 2005 North
American Society for the Study of Romanticism that was
held in Montreal, Canada. Romanticism is a mainstay of
the conversation between Hartman and Marc Redfield,
centering on Hartman's life-long shaping of Wordsworth
as the paradoxically both radical and measured bearer
of modernity. Their discussion also touches upon a wide
range of topics that include the necessity of a
multi-linguistic approach to literature, the nature of
terror, and how Hartman and Bloom read differently. The
interview with Harold Bloom occurred in his home in New
Haven, Connecticut, shortly after Thanksgiving 2005,
with family members of both Bloom and Laura Quinney
present. In Bloom's and Quinney's conversation,
romanticism is not so much the focus but rather a
constant presence, signaled by references to Blake,
Wordsworth, Emerson, and Whitman. Mixing the convivial
and domestic with the sublime, Bloom keeps his
attention fixed on the question of Yaweh, in a way less
about what brings comfort than what unsettles, or even
dismays.
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Many thanks are in order for this volume's creation:
to my co-editors, Marc Redfield and Laura Quinney, for
the keen intelligence and sharp intrepidness that they
brought to this project; to Kate Singer, William
Flesch, and Lisa Marie Rhody for the technical support
that made the interviews possible; to Jeanne Bloom for
her gracious hospitality and Daniel and Julian Flesch
for their patience during the interview in New Haven;
and to Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom for the
uncommon generosity and openness, intellectual and
otherwise, that they evinced from the beginning to the
end of this project.
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