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This page is about the poet and critic. For other persons with this name, see Kevin Hart

Kevin Hart (b. 1954) is an Australian poet, literary critic, philosopher and theologian.

In addition to his poetry volumes, he has published studies of Jacques Derrida, Samuel Johnson and most recently French literary critic and philosopher Maurice Blanchot.[1]

A Catholic, Hart has also been engaged in conversations in contemporary philosophical theology, particularly in relation to recent discussions in continental philosophy (Martin Heidegger, Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas) and the thinkers who have taken the so-called theological turn in recent French phenomenology (such as Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Louis Chretien, Michel Henry). Hart wrote one of the intitial engagements with the relationship between non-metaphysical and mystical theologies and the deconstructive philosophy of Jacques Derrida (Trespass of the Sign).

Life and academic career

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Hart was born in England, and grew up in London until he was 11 when his family migrated to Brisbane, Australia,[2] where he attended primary school.[3] He was educated at the Australian National University and the University of Melbourne.

Hart spent most of his early career at Monash University, where he taught in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, as well as the English Department. In 2001 he left Australia to take up a position at the University of Notre Dame. In 2007, he accepted a position at the University of Virginia.

Hart and Samuel Johnson

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Perhaps because his training has been largely in postmodernism, Hart's scholarly foray into Samuel Johnson and the eighteenth century was not particularly successful, nor has it been widely embraced by other scholars.

Writing in the scholarly journal Romanticism, Wolfram Schmidgen of the University of Leeds noted Hart's "loose conceptualization," his "lengthy and half-hearted excursion" into extraneous topics, and the stylistic "tentativeness and indirection" of his prose. Though the book "offers an attractive agenda," it "loses touch a bit with his main topic," makes an "incomplete and imprecise connection" between Johnson and the culture of property, and "is frequently plagued by exasperatingly oblique links between its different concerns and levels of discussion."[4]

Lisa Berglund of Connecticut College noted in Albion that summarizing Hart's argument was a "frustrating" and "fruitless" experience as his thesis was "so flexible as to become almost meaningless." Though she noted his "creative" and "quick-darting" mind, Berglund concluded that "the almost spasmodic leaps in his argument are often confusing."[5]

In The Review of English Studies, Katherine Turner of St. Peter's College, Oxford, composed an incisive review, noting that Hart "frequently degenerates into anecdote and speculation," that his approach is "uneven," "inconsistent," and "far-fetched." Most damning of all, Turner notes that the book's "essentialist assumptions" are "rather dubious" and that Hart "performs little more than the function of anecdotal hagiography." As an antidote to the fulsome praise heaped on Hart by Harold Bloom, Turner observes that "An ominous back-jacket puff from Harold Bloom warns of what might lurk within" Samuel Johnson and the Culture of Property.[6]


Poetry

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In his early career he was one of a group of poets often referred to as the Canberra Poets. In addition to Kevin Hart, they included Alan Gould, Mark O’Connor, Geoff Page, and Les Murray.


Hart has a combative relationship with other Australian poets, especially Les Murray (generally recognized as Australia's finest poet). Hart faults Murray for restricting and reducing Hart's personal conception of "Australian poetry" yet reductively dismisses Murray's own poetry as distasteful ideology. He accuses Murray of a narrow and patriarchal view of Australian identity and of a backward poetics wherein "modernity is cast as the enemy" and then reduces Murray to a "sermoniser and polemicist, the man who talks chillingly of how society cannot survive without male blood sacrifices." Hart's appraisal of Murray concludes with a vicious diatribe and complete dismissal of Murray's accomplishments: "Although he [Murray] laments that Australia has 'vanished into ideology', he has transformed himself into the most ideological of our poets, and to the detriment of his verse. Over the last decade his work has turned increasingly entete [translated as "pig-headed"], animated more by linguistic dexterity than by feeling, and given to indulge hobbyhorse theories of poetry. While he has occasionally regained form, sometimes with considerable verve, his later work often seems more like material for poetry rather than finished poems."[7] Ironically, Kevin Hart has been seen as a follower of Les Murray. Nicholas Birns writes that "the complicated poetic-critical project of Kevin Hart is powerfully influenced by Murray's example."[8]


As for the reception of his own poems, reviewer Pam Brown writes of Hart's 1999 Wicked Heat, "It’s as if these poems were written by a very serious old man and, apart from a recognisable poetic compulsion to write, it’s sometimes hard to grasp the point of this transparent yet obtuse set. Kevin Hart once wrote ‘Good poems lead us from certainty to uncertainty’. So, in his own terms Wicked Heat succeeds.".[3]


Reviewing Hart's New and Selected Poems in Social Alternatives, a refereed scholarly journal published quarterly in Australia, John Leonard noted that Hart is "a consistently accomplished Romantic lyrist" who maintains "command of tone, subject-matter, thought or language." Nevertheless, Leonard notes that Hart "is writing uncritically a kind of poem that is incredibly dated." Leonard substantiates this with textual analysis, pointing to Hart's reliance upon "a familiar Romantic desire for unity and transcendence, and a mish-mash of other dialectical oppositions, such as death and desire, the particular and the absolute, and so forth, all stirred up into a sickly brew with a generous dash of Christian mysticism." Quoting Hart's poems, Leonard notes as well Hart's tendency to make contradictory poetic statements: "For, despite his claim in one poem to exist within 'the whole of language' (73), Hart's desire for the absolute impoverishes and falsifies; when, for example, the absolute is figured it is inevitably 'nameless' (117) or speaks 'a meaning we cannot count' (185)." Leonard concludes that Hart's poems falsely equate poetry with life: "The blurb of this volume quotes Hart to the effect that 'a theory of poetry is a theory of life'. Fortunately, this is not true, a theory of poetry is theory of poetry. Fortunately too, there are other kinds of poetry."[9]


His poetry has won a number of Australian prizes, including the C. J. Dennis Prize for Poetry and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry for his 1984 book, Your Shadow. He has also won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for poetry, the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry, the Harri Jones Prize, the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award, the Mattara Award, and the Wesley Michel Wright Award.[10] In addition, Hart has been awarded the Christopher Brennan Award by the Fellowship of Australian Writers. This Award recognises poets who have made a sustained contribution to Australian poetry.


Bibliography

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Poetry

  • The Departure (1978)
  • The Lines of Your Hand (1981)
  • Your Shadow (1984)
  • Peniel (1991)
  • New and Selected Poems (1994)
  • Dark Angel (1996)
  • Nineteen Songs (1999)
  • Wicked Heat (1999)
  • Madonna (2000)
  • Flame Tree (2002)
  • Night Music (2004)

Criticism

  • The Trespass of the Sign (1989)
  • A.D. Hope (1992)
  • Losing the Power to Say ‘I’ (1996)
  • Samuel Johnson and the Culture of Property (1999)
  • How to Read a Page of Boswell (2000)
  • The Impossible (2004)
  • Nowhere Without No: In Memory of Maurice Blanchot (editor; 2004)
  • Postmodernism: A Beginner’s Guide (2004)
  • The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (2004)
  • Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (with Yvonne Sherwood, 2004)
  • The Experience of God (Editor, with Barbara Wall), 2005)
  • Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion (editor; 2007)
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Notes

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  1. ^ Brennan
  2. ^ Mitchell (2006)
  3. ^ a b Brown (1999)
  4. ^ Schmidgen (2001)
  5. ^ Berglund (2001)
  6. ^ Turner (2000)
  7. ^ Hart (1993)
  8. ^ Birns (1996)
  9. ^ Leonard (1995)
  10. ^ Thylazine: Kevin Hart

References

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