Reflexion on Relationship: Literature and Religion in the Literary Critics of Geoffrey Hartman

Abstract

This article concerns a transition of the cultural image of religious experience. This transition — shaped by Anglo-Saxon romanticism — was identified by the American literary critic Geoffrey Hartman in literature. The most important aspects of this transition are: the victory of a creative model of poetry over a mimetic model, the epitaphic sensibility to the transitoriness of the world, the naturalization of supernaturalism (according to M.H. Abrams’s formula: natural supernaturalism) and the relinquishment of answers to ultimate questions. The horizon of searching for a sense of this transition is marked by quasi-messianism in view of Adorno — i.e. a belief that you should prize the variety of incomplete answers more than the integrality of ultimate truths.