Geoffrey H. Hartman, a literary critic whose work took in the Romantic poets, Judaic sacred texts, Holocaust studies, deconstruction and the workings of memory — and took on the very function of criticism itself — died on March 14 at his home in Hamden, Conn. He was 86.

His death was announced by Yale University, where he was the Sterling professor emeritus of English and comparative literature.

Considered one of the world’s foremost scholars of literature, Professor Hartman was associated with the “Yale School,” a cohort of literary theorists that included Harold Bloom, J. Hillis Miller and Paul de Man. Their work was rooted in deconstruction, the approach to analyzing the multilayered relationship between a text and its meaning that was advanced by the 20th-century French philosopher Jacques Derrida.

Professor Hartman was renowned for his vast Continental erudition. His scholarly attention ranged over Wordsworth, to whom he was long devoted; the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins; Judaica (he helped found the Judaic studies program at Yale); Alfred Hitchcock; Freud; detective stories; and the nature of trauma, the memory of trauma and testimony about trauma — interests borne of his own wartime experience — as well as the ways in which traumatic recollections can be filtered through the creative imagination.

Among his best-known books are “Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814” (1964); “Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today” (1980), considered a landmark in the field; “The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust” (1996); and a memoir, “A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe” (2007).

He was the first director of what is now the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale. Begun in 1979, the archive, which is open to the public, comprises more than 4,000 interviews with Holocaust survivors, witnesses and liberators from around the world.

As a result of his association with the Yale School, Professor Hartman was often called a deconstructionist, but his critical stance eluded tidy classification.

Deconstruction maintains that any given text is, below its surface, a roiling system of conflicting semantic signs. As such, the text has no one empirical reading; it is, rather, a network of competing meanings — a quicksilver state of affairs that a critical analysis of that text must take into account.

Early on, Professor Hartman championed this approach. But over time he went deconstruction one better, arguing that a literary text is so pregnant with possible readings that to make an evaluative judgment about it — or even, perhaps, to extract an inventory of its meanings — is futile.

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, incontaining 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?”

Geoffrey H. Hartmann, as the family name was then spelled, was born in Frankfurt on Aug. 11, 1929. (In a curious augury for one whose life would center on signification, his middle initial stood for nothing.) His father left the family when Geoffrey was very young.

In 1939, Geoffrey was among the Jewish children evacuated from Nazi Germany as part of a Kindertransport. He spent the war years in England, living with other evacuated children at Waddesdon Manor, the Buckinghamshire country estate of James de Rothschild, a scion of the banking family.

There, to stave off isolation, he read voraciously and lost himself in the verdant countryside — an experience that would seed his lifelong passion for Wordsworth.

His mother managed to flee Germany for New York but could not send for Geoffrey, her only child, until after the war. Joining her there, he parted company with the final “n” of “Hartmann,” stripping the name of its most conspicuous Teutonic trace.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature, summa cum laude, from Queens College in 1949 and later studied as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Dijon in France. He received a Ph.D. in comparative literature in 1953 from Yale, where his teachers included the distinguished Czech émigré critic Rene Wellek.

Professor Hartman first joined the Yale faculty in 1955. He spent the early and mid-1960s at the University of Iowa and at Cornell before rejoining Yale in 1967.

In 1988, he came to wide notice with a long article in The New Republic about his colleague Paul de Man. De Man, who died in 1983, had incurred worldwide posthumous censure after it was revealed in 1988 that during the war he had written hundreds of articles for collaborationist newspapers in his native Belgium.

Professor Hartman’s essay, written in response to those revelations, was commended in some quarters for forthright introspection but condemned in others for what detractors saw as his lenient appraisal of de Man’s ideology.

Professor Hartman’s survivors include his wife, the former Renée Gross; a son, David; a daughter, Liz Hartman; and a grandson.

His other books include “Saving the Text: Literature, Derrida, Philosophy” (1981); “Minor Prophecies: The Literary Essay in the Culture Wars” (1991); and “Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity” (2002).

He received the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2006 for “The Geoffrey Hartman Reader,” an anthology, published in 2004, that he edited with Daniel T. O’Hara.

To navigate the world of “wild surmise” in which the critical mind so often dwells, it behooves the critic, Professor Hartman said, to hew a path through the textual landscape. The path may run in many directions at once — a formal luxury that was once the exclusive province of the creative artist. In his view, however, it was also the prerogative of the critic.

“Interpretation is like a football game,” Professor Hartman wrote in “The Voice of the Shuttle,” a 1969 essay. “You spot a hole and you go through. But first you may have to induce that opening.”