- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3828/eir.2015.22.2.7
- Language
- English
- Pages
- 19
Abstract
This essay examines ways in which Geoffrey Hartman’s classic study Wordsworth’s Poetry (1964) troubles the notion of the imagination as an integral identity or power. Despite his book’s famous identification of the apocalyptic imagination with self-consciousness, Hartman makes legible the possibility that self-consciousness is a reaction formation to something akin to an experience of shock. Far from being an exaggerated instance of the egoistic sublime or of so-called Romantic ideology, this violent, haunted, and rhetorically complex imagination operates on the near side of trauma and seems in its most intense manifestations a non-human, even non-animate force.
