A celebration of Geoffrey Hartman’s enduring legacy as a critic – prompted by the reissue of Criticism in the Wilderness (1980) – the symposium drew together different aspects of the work of a critic who has self-confessedly pursued the elusive dream that criticism might be a form of literature.  Associated with the ‘Yale School’ that melded Anglo-American criticism and Continental literary theory, Geoffrey Hartman is also a distinguished critic of Romantic poetry, especially Wordsworth. In addition, he is well known for his contribution to Holocaust Studies, including his work in setting up the Fortunov Archive for video testimony at Yale. His visit to Cambridge, twenty years after giving the Clark Lectures, coincided with the publication of his ‘biographia literaria’, A Scholar’s Tale (subtitled Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe). Among his other scholarly and critical achievements is Hartman’s recovery of the legacy of European comparativism that his own childhood uprooting interrupted. The symposium paid tribute to the impact of Hartman as a scholar-critic whose passion, erudition and discernment were evident throughout the event.

The symposium opened with  Geoffrey Hartman’s lecture, ‘Holocaust Testimony in a Genocidal Era’, which addressed the problem of where we should invest our limited resources of compassion in a genocidal age, along with the importance of civic and generational memory and the implications for testimony of new media. The symposium next day paid tribute to the double strands in Hartman’s work. The morning’s panels, ‘Witnessing the Holocaust’ (convened by MML) included papers by faculty and graduates on the ethics and aesthetics of Holocaust witnessing; topics included public and private memory; film, fantasy and politics; and autobiography and testimony. The afternoon, ‘Wordsworth in the Wilderness’, began with an imaginative and challenging paper by Geoffrey Hartman himself on Wordsworth’s Lucy poems that took as its point of departure Freud’s comment that the aim of all life is death. A series of papers by scholar-critics from Cambridge and London responded with reflections on Hartman’s work that ranged from the question of the species to the rights of trees, the scansion of poetry and the role of criticism. The day culminated in a fitting tribute that ‘witnessed’ to Hartman as a critic by paying tribute to the ways in which his criticism had allowed both affect and autobiography to become part of critical writing. A lively participant throughout the day, Geoffrey Hartman was a generous and discerning commentator at an event that testified to the enduring legacy of his own criticism, in and out of the wilderness.