Geoffrey Galt Harpham

Geoffrey Galt Harpham is an American academic who currently serves as the fifth President and Director of the National Humanities Center, succeeding Charles Frankel, William Bennett, Charles Blitzer, and Robert Connor. One of the characteristics of his tenure has been the encouragement of dialogue between the humanities on the one hand and the natural and social sciences on the other.^[1][2]

He is at the same time a Visiting Research Professor of English at Duke University and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and also a Life Member of Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge.^[3] He is in addition a member of the Board of Visitors of Ralston College.^[4]

His most recent book, The Humanities and the Dream of America, was published by the University of Chicago Press in March 2011.^[5][6]

Selected publications

Books

• On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton University Press, 1982; paperback, 1986). 2nd ed. with new preface (Davies Publishing, 2006). This work was the primary inspiration for “Domus Aurea,” a composition by Edmund Campion for piano and vibraphone, which premiered at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, November 4, 2000.
• The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism (University of Chicago Press, 1987; paperback, 1992).
• Getting It Right: Language, Literature, and Ethics (University of Chicago Press, 1992). Partially translated into Croatian as “Pripovjedni Imperative,” in Politika ietika pripovijedanja, ed. Vladimir Biti (Zagreb: Hrvatska sveučilišna naklada, 2003), 129-56.
• One of Us: The Mastery of Joseph Conrad (University of Chicago Press, 1996).
• Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (Duke University Press, 1999).
• Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity (Routledge Press, 2002).
• A Glossary of Literary Terms, 8th ed., coauthored with M. H. Abrams (Wadsworth, 2005); 9th ed. (Wadsworth, 2008). Translated into Persian, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, Greek. Indian edition, 2009.
• The Character of Criticism (Routledge Press, 2006).
• On Being Human, special issue of Daedalus, 138.3 (2009), consulting editor. This issue grew out of the “Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity: The Human and the Humanities” initiative sponsored by the National Humanities Center, 2006-09.

Articles, Review-Essays, Etc.

• “The Incompleteness of Beardsley’s Venus and Tannhäuser,” English Literature in Transition 18.1 (1975): 24-32.
• “Jack London and the Tradition of Superman Socialism,” American Studies 16.1 (1975): 23-33.
• “The Grotesque: First Principles,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 34.4 (1976): 461-78.
• “Time Running Out: The Edwardian Sense of Cultural Degeneration,” Clio 5.3 (1976): 283-301.
• “Minority Report: Tono-Bungay and the Shape of Wells’s Career,” Modern Language Quarterly 39.1 (1978): 50-62.
• “Survival in and of The Painted Bird,” Georgia Review 35.1 (1981): 142-57.
• “The Grotesque and the Limits of Representation,” Annals of Scholarship 2.3 (1982): 33-48.
• “E. L. Doctorow and the Technology of Narrative,” PMLA 100.1 (1985): 81-95; reprinted in E.L. Doctorow: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (Chelsea House, 2002), 27-50.
• “The Language of Longing,” review-essay of Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), Raritan 4.4 (1985): 107-14.
• “The Fertile Word: Augustine and Hermeneutics,” Criticism 38.3 (1986): 237-54.
• “Short Stack: The Stories of Breece Pancake,” Studies in Short Fiction 23.3 (1986): 265-74.
• “Language, History, and Ethics,” review-essay of Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1985), and J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading (Columbia University Press, 1986), Raritan 7.1 (1987): 128-46.
• “Rhetoric and the Madness of Philosophy in Plato and Pirsig,” Contemporary Literature 29.1(1988): 64-88.
• “Foucault and the ‘Ethics’ of Power,” in Ethics/Aesthetics: Postmodern Positions, ed. Robert Merrill (Maisonneuve Press, 1988), 71-82.
• “Conversion and the Language of Autobiography,” in Studies in Autobiography, ed. James Olney (Oxford University Press, 1988), 42-51.
• “Valuemania,” review-essay of Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Harvard University Press, 1988), Raritan 9.1 (1989): 134-50.
• “Fish on Blind Submission,” PMLA 104.2 (1989): 215-16.
• “Ethics and the Double Standard of Criticism,” Southern Humanities Review 23.4 (1989): 343-58. (Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award)
• “Response to Barbara Herrnstein Smith,” Raritan 9.4 (1990): 146-50.
• “Derrida and the Ethics of Criticism,” Textual Practice 5.3 (1991): 382-98.
• “Foucault and the New Historicism,” review-essay of H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (Routledge Press, 1989), and Jonathan Arac, ed., After Foucault (Rutgers University Press, 1988), American Literary History 3.2 (1991): 361-75.
• “The Future and Literary Theory,” review-essay of Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign (Oklahoma University Press, 1988), Ellen Rooney, Seductive Reasoning (Cornell University Press, 1989), and Ralph Cohen, ed., The Future of Literary Theory (Routledge Press, 1989), Modern Philology 89.1 (1991): 8-24.
• “Abroad Only by a Fiction: Creation, Irony, and Necessity in Conrad’s The Secret Agent,” Representations 37 (Winter 1992): 79-103.
• “Old Water in New Bottles: The Contemporary Prospects for the Study of Asceticism,” Semeia 58 (1992): 135-48.
• “Aesthetics and the Fundamentals of Modernity,” in Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George Levine (Rutgers University Press, 1994), 124-49.
• “So . . . What Is Enlightenment? An Inquisition into Modernity,” Critical Inquiry 20.3 (1994): 524-56.
• “Asceticism and the Compensations of Art,” in Asceticism, ed. Vincent Wimbush and Richard Valantasis (Oxford University Press, 1995), 357-68.
• “Ethics,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd ed., ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (University of Chicago Press, 1995), 387-405.
• “Of Rats and Men; or, Reason in Our Time,” Raritan 14.4 (1995): 88-114.
• “Late Jameson,” Salmagundi 111 (Summer 1996): 213-32.
• “The Business of Mourning,” Southern Review 32.3 (1996): 537-55; reprinted in Naming the Father: Legacies, Genealogies, and Explorations of Fatherhood in Modern and Contemporary Literature, ed. Eva Paulino Beuno, Terry Caesar, and William Hummel (Lexington Books, 2000), 13-28.
• “Freedom and Submission,” on Michel Foucault, in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, vol. 1 of The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (New Press, 1997), Boston Book Review 4.6 (1997): 6.
• “The Order of Things,” on Michel Foucault, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, vol. 2 of The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-84, ed. James Faubion (New Press, 1997), Boston Book Review 5.3 (1998): 26-27.
• “Once Again: Geoffrey Hartman on Culture,” Raritan 18.2 (1998): 146-66.
• “On ‘Consequences,’ ” in The Stanley Fish Reader, ed. H. Aram Veeser (Blackwell, 1998), 86-87.
• “Chomsky and the Rest of Us,” Salmagundi 121-122 (Winter-Spring 1999): 211-37.
• “Imagining the Centre,” in Critical Ethics: Text, Theory and Responsibility, ed. Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods (Macmillan, 1999), 37-52.
• “Ascetics, Aesthetics, and the Management of Desire,” in Religion and Cultural Studies, ed. Susan Mizruchi (Princeton University Press, 2001), 95-109.
• “The End of Theory, the Rise of the Profession: A Rant,” in Professions: Conversations on the Future of Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Donald Hall (University of Illinois Press, 2001), 186-201. Reprinted in Theory’s Empire, ed. Will Corral and Daphne Patai (Columbia University Press, 2005).
• “Elaine Scarry and the Dream of Pain,” Salmagundi 130-131 (Spring-Summer 2001): 202-34.
• “Ethics and Literary Criticism,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 9, ed. Christa Knellwolf and Christopher Norris (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 371-85.
• “Conrad’s Global Homeland,” Raritan 21.1 (2001): 20-33.
• “Symbolic Terror,” Critical Inquiry 28.2 (2002): 573-80.
• “Symbolic Terror,” Literary Research / Recherches Littéraire 18.36 (2001): 262-68 (same as above).
• “The Hunger of Martha Nussbaum,” Representations 77 (Winter 2002): 52-81.
• “Questions Still Hover over Declarations of War,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, October 7, 2002, sec. B, p. 4.
• “Doing the Impossible: Slavoj Zizek and the End of Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry 29.3 (2003): 453-85.
• “Response to Slavoj Zizek,” Critical Inquiry 29.3 (2003): 504-7.
• “Pripovjedni Imperative,” in Politika i etika pripovijedanja, ed. Vladimir Biti (Zagreb: Hrvatska sveučilišna naklada, 2003), 129-56. Croatian translation of pp. 157-83 of Getting It Right.
• “From Revolution to Canon: On The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism,” Kenyon Review 25.2 (2003): 169-77.
• “Inadmissible Evidence: Terror, Torture, and the World Today,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 15, 2004, sec. B, pp. 12-13.
• “Beyond Mastery: The Future of Conrad’s Beginnings,” in Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives, ed. Carola Kaplan, Peter Mallios, and Andrea White (Routledge Press, 2005), 17-39.
• “Beyond and Beneath the ‘Crisis in the Humanities,’ ” in “Essays on the Humanities,” special issue, New Literary History 36.1 (2005): 21-36. This issue of the journal was constructed around this essay.
• “Response,” New Literary History 36.1 (2005): 105-10.
• “Politics, Professionalism, and the Pleasure of Reading,” Daedalus 134.3 (2005): 68-75.
• “Derrida, Said, and Infinity,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 6.3 (2005), online at http://www.jcrt.org/archives/06.3/harpham.pdf.
• “Things and Theory,” review-essay of Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2003), Raritan (Fall 2005): 134-45.
• “Language and Prehistory,” in Language and History: Integrationist Perspectives, ed. Nigel Love (Routledge Press, 2006), 188-99.
• “Between Humanity and the Homeland: The Evolution of an Institutional Concept,” American Literary History 18.2 (2006): 245-61, online at http://alh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/rapidpdf/ajj013?ijkey=aJ3kV61TDxS3Biz&keytype=ref
• “Returning to Philology: The Past and Future of Literary Study,” in New Prospects in Literary Research, ed. Koen Hilberdink (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2005), online at http://www.knaw.nl/publicaties/pdf/20051060.pdf.
• “Science and the Theft of Humanity,” American Scientist (July-August 2006): 296-98.
• “Character, Criticism and Tenure,” interview with Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed, December 27, 2006, online at http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee144.
• “Genre and the Institution of Research: Three American Instances,” PMLA 122.5 (2007): 1635-43. Translated into Polish, 2008.
• “Cultural Critics and Modernist Avant-Garde: A Debate,” interview in The Humanities Today: International Exchange of Scholarly Ideas in the Humanities between Nepal and the United States, ed. Yubraj Aryal (Philosophical Society of Nepal, 2008), 93-97. Republished in The Humanities at Work: International Exchange of Ideas in Aesthetics, Philosophy, and Literature, ed. Yubraj Aryal (Kathmandu: Sunlight Publication, 2008), 100-106.
• “The Humanities in America,” online through the University of Copenhagen, http://hum21.ku.dk/humanities_in_a_new_millenium/ (March 2008).
• “Trading Pain for Knowledge; Or, How the West Was Won,” Social Research 75.2 (2008): 485-510.
• “Disciplinary Fitness: On Evolutionary Literary Studies,” Style 42.2-3 (2008): 197-201.
• “The Human and the Humanities,” Wake County Physician 14.4 (2008): 26, 35.
• “The Depths of the Heights: Reading Conrad with America’s Soldiers,” Profession (2008): 74-82; also in War, Literature, and the Arts 20.1-2 (2009): 35-44.
• “The Humanities’ Value,” Chronicle Review, March 20, 2009, B6-7.
• “Architecture and Ethics: 16 Points,” in Inverting the Iceberg: Ethics, Efficacy, and Architecture in the Globalized Economy, ed. Graham Owen (Routledge Press, 2009), 33-39.
• “Roots, Races, and the Return to Philology,” Representations 106 (Spring 2009): 34-63.
• “How Do We Know What We Are? The Science of Language and Human Self-Understanding,” Daedalus 138.3 (2009): 79-91.
• “How Does Literature Teach Ethics?” Journal of Philosophy 4.10 (2009): 1-14.

References

External links

• The National Humanities Center
• Recent Publications of Geoffrey Harpham
• Curriculum Vitae of Geoffrey Galt Harpham