Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom: Two Interviews

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. 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.