

Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, Aeneas tells Dido the misfortunes of the Trojan city, 1815

I n April 1981, TheNew York Times Book Review published an essay by the literary theorist Geoffrey Hartman that proposed a whole different model of academic criticism. Whereas traditional criticism served the primary text, aiming to clarify, elucidate, and otherwise expound on the original, Hartman argued that “new kinds of commentary” possess an “expressive force” and mark an “inventive feat, a ‘creative’ rather than a definitive...