By longstanding tradition, as Professor Hartman reminded his readers, literary criticism was seen as a handmaiden of literature — an adjunct whose sole raison d’être was literature itself.

In “Criticism in the Wilderness,” he argued that criticism should not only stand on an equal footing with literature but also be literature. (Classifying criticism as literature inevitably triggers a hall-of-mirrors effect, the kind of Talmudic paradox that was to Professor Hartman a source of unalloyed delight: If criticism becomes literature, it is thus amenable to critical analysis. How, then, does one classify the criticism that results?)

In elevating criticism to the status of literature, Professor Hartman did not mean merely that it should be well written. What he also meant was that criticism should function for criticism’s sake alone.

“The spectacle of the critic’s mind disoriented, bewildered, caught in some ‘wild surmise’ about the text and struggling to adjust — is not that one of the interests critical writing has for us?” he wrote in “Criticism in the Wilderness.”

He continued: “In more casual acts of reading this bewilderment can be muted, for there is always the hint of a resolution further on, or an enticement to enter for its own sake the author’s world. However, in containing this bewilderment, formal critical commentary is not very different from fiction itself.”

Professor Hartman’s critical writings occasioned, quite fittingly, a spate of critical responses. His style — suffused with puns, linguistic play and self-referential asides that mulled the meanings of the very words springing from his pen — was praised by some observers for its transparency and damned by others for its opacity. Sometimes, in the course of analyzing one of his works, a critic was moved to both opinions at once.

Reviewing “Criticism in the Wilderness” in The New York Times Book Review, the literary scholar Denis Donoghue wrote: “His own style makes me wonder. In one mood, he is a vigorous, witty, trenchant writer, formidably lucid and polemical. Many of his sentences make me feel: I wish I had said that. But some of them make me feel: I wonder would that be worth the labor of understanding it?”