| John T. Hamilton | |
| Birth Date: | 1 March 1963 |
| Birth Place: | Bronx, New York, U.S. |
| Nationality: | American |
| Discipline: | Literature |
| Sub Discipline: | Comparative Literature, German Literature, Classical Philology, Music and Literature |
| William R. Kenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature | |
| Workplaces: | Harvard University, University of California, Santa Cruz, New York University, Bristol University |
| Alma Mater: | New York University (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, 1999) |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Richard Sieburth |
| Notable Works: | Soliciting Darkness: Pindar, Obscurity, and the Classical Tradition (2004), Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language (2008), (2013) |
| Awards: | Multiple academic fellowships including Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, ETH Zürich, Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin, and Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study |
| Known For: | Scholarship in 18th- and 19th-century literature, Classical Philology, Music and Literature, Literary Theory |
| Website: | Harvard Faculty Page |
John T. Hamilton (born March 1, 1963, Bronx, NY) is a literary scholar, musician, and William R. Kenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He previously held positions at the University of California-Santa Cruz (in Classics) and New York University (Comparative Literature and German), and has also taught as a visiting professor at the Institute of Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition at Bristol University. Numerous academic fellowships include the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the ETH-Zürich, the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin, and the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study.
Hamilton received his doctorate in Comparative Literature at New York University in 1999 under the directorship of Richard Sieburth. Primary teaching and research topics include 18th- and 19th-century Literature, Classical Philology and Reception History, Music and Literature, Literary Theory and Political Metaphorology.
From 1985 to 1996 Hamilton was the guitarist and principal songwriter, together with Donna Croughn, for the band Tiny Lights, based in Hoboken, New Jersey.
In Soliciting Darkness: Pindar, Obscurity, and the Classical Tradition (2004), Hamilton offers a broad investigation of Pindar, the archaic Greek lyric poet, and his long reception history in European literature and scholarship, addressing a variety of pressing issues, including the recovery and appropriation of classical texts, problems of translation, representations of lyric authenticity, and the possibility or impossibility of a continuous literary tradition. The poetics of obscurity that comes to be articulated across the centuries suggests that taking Pindar to be an incomprehensible poet may not simply be the result of an insufficient or false reading, but rather may serve as a wholly adequate judgment.
Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language (2008) grapples with Romantic figurations of the mad musician, which challenge the limits of representation and thereby instigate a profound crisis in language. Special attention is given to the decidedly autobiographical impulse of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where musical experience and mental disturbance disrupt the expression of referential thought, illuminating the irreducible aspects of the self before language can work them back into a discursive system.
A philological approach motivates (2013),which examines the discursive versatility and semantic vagueness of the term security both in current and historical usage. Hamilton explores the fundamental ambiguity of this word, which denotes the removal of "concern" or "care" and therefore implies a condition that is either carefree or careless. Spanning texts from ancient Greek poetry to Roman Stoicism, from Augustine and Luther to Machiavelli and Hobbes, from Kant and Nietzsche to Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, the study analyzes formulations of security that involve both safety and negligence, confidence and complacency, certitude and ignorance.
The philological attention to a single term drives two subsequent studies, On Complacency (Über die Selbstgefälligkeit, 2021) and Complacency: Classics and its Displacement in Higher Education (2022). Both works compare the superiority of the classical curriculum in prior centuries with the current hegemony of mathematics and the sciences—how qualitative methods of teaching and research relate to the quantitative positivism of big data, statistical reasoning, and presumably neutral abstraction, which risk dismissing humanist subjectivity and legitimizing self-sufficiency. Throughout, emphasis is placed on a persistent paronomasia that relates the Latin verb for pleasing (placere) to adjectives describing flatness (e.g., Greek plax, plakos and platys, Latin planus). The governing metaphor implies that pleasing experiences are akin to traversing a flattened area without bumps or disruptions. Complacency thus points to the pleasant delusion that one proceeds through a two-dimensional realm where disturbances are ignored or dismissed. A central text is the satirical novel Flatland (1884) by Edwin Abbott Abbott.
Philology of the Flesh (2018) reflects on the poetic implications and ramifications of the incarnational metaphor, whereby the Word is said to become flesh. By pressing the notion of philology as “love” (philia) for the “word” (logos), Hamilton's readings investigate the breadth, depth, and limits of verbal styles that are irreducible to mere information. While a philologist of the body might understand words as corporeal vessels of core meaning, the philologist of the flesh, by focusing on the carnal qualities of language, resists taking words as mere containers. Textual analyses include readings of Lorenzo Valla, Johann Georg Hamann and Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan.
In France/Kafka: An Author in Theory (2023), Hamilton recounts how a German writer of Jewish descent in Prague came to serve as an urgent obsession in the literary and intellectual capital of Paris, how a writer of relative obscurity, one who barely published during his all-too-brief lifetime, emerged within years after his death to be hailed as a central figure in the European literary canon. Accordingly, what has come to be known as French Theory is shown to have drawn fundamental impetus from Kafka’s texts, from existentialism to post-structuralism. In a crucial sense, Kafka turns out to be the spiritual godfather of the theoretical models that continue to shape our reading practices.