Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity - Softcover

Hartman, Dr. Geoffrey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1403965587 ISBN 13: 9781403965585

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2004

Synopsis

In this fascinating collection of essays, noted cultural critic Geoffrey Hartman raises the essential question of where we can find the real or authentic in today's 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 today's 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.

About this title

About the Author

Geoffrey Hartman is one of America's most renowned literary critics. He is the Sterling Professor (Emeritus) of English & Comparative Literature at Yale University and cofounder and Project Director, Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.

Review

“Hartman successfully recasts some of our basic questions--and it is perhaps through our questions that we understand our human predicament. Recommended.” ―Library Journal

“Hartman carefully shows how reading can lead us to our authentic selves.” ―Publishers Weekly

“...a profound recognition of the weight and value that words can have. Hartman's intensely scrupulous manner of scrutinizing things is in itself a form of authenticity.” ―Los Angeles Times

“In 13 personal essays, Hartman examines the interaction between life and art, focusing on concerns about the authentic.” ―W.F. Williams, Choice

“This is a profound, learned, impassioned meditation on the role literary study can play in invigorating the imaginative life of our civilization--without which it is difficult to imagine having a civilization at all.” ―Jonathan Rosen, author of The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey between Worlds

“A certain kind of reading--end driven, moving toward the satisfaction of conclusion and resolution--is not the pleasure given by this text; and indeed were the text to give it, it would be in tension with its own mode of thinking, a mode of thinking we can weakly call dialectic, moving back and forth between the noting of appearance and fakery everywhere and the equally omnipresent desire for the real. In the experience it provides, this beautifully written book is truer to the lesson it would teach: the difficulty and necessity of the search for the authentic.” ―Stanley Fish, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago

Edition details

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1403965587
• ISBN 13: 9781403965585
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 260