Holocaust and Hope: Literature, Testimony, Media - Paperback

by Geoffrey Hartman (Author), Kevis Goodman (Editor), Brian McGrath (Editor)

A final work by one of our major critics, contemplating how acts of distant witnessing can continue in future generations.

Back Jacket

"In this beautifully composed volume Geoffrey Hartman explores the important place of 'literary knowledge' in the aftermath of the Holocaust, insisting on the non-redemptive hope borne by an imaginative language that watches over 'absent meaning.' Framed by an excellent introduction and punctuated by an illuminating interview, Hartman's irreplaceable voice, returning posthumously to us at our own moment of political and ethical crisis, calls upon us to refuse the emptying out of language and thought typical of totalitarian movements and to find the future-oriented words that, like stars, can still have 'an independent existence, that hang glittering in the firmament of discourse.'"--Cathy Caruth, Cornell University

Holocaust and Hope shows one of our preeminent critics grappling with a subject to which he had returned for decades: literary, cultural, political, and historiographical implications of the Holocaust and its aftermath in Europe and America. In his last planned book, Geoffrey Hartman confronts contradictions that pose a challenge for our present and future. The passing of Holocaust survivors and their immediate families makes continued acts of witnessing more necessary even as distance in time makes the identities and acts of future witnessing more complicated. In addition, the particular kinds of amplification that we may be accustomed to or expect from our contemporary media environment can call forth not an intensity of response but rather an inertia, an "unreality effect," that can come unexpectedly from the heightening of the real, or the hyperreality of too much, too fast, too strong.

Holocaust and Hope takes seriously the difference between our coming after Auschwitz and our being past it. With characteristic intensity and humanity, Hartman's essays explore the full complexity of how to transmit knowledge of the Holocaust to the future in ways that avoid simplification, the illusion of synthesis, or the aspiration to final closure, on the one hand, or compulsive repetition on the other. A significant part of the answer, for Hartman, requires special attention to the role of literary and audiovisual forms in promoting an active witnessing to extreme suffering that is relevant both for our time and the encroaching future.

Geoffrey Hartman was Sterling Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale and Project Director of its Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.

Author Biography

Geoffrey Hartman (Author)
Geoffrey Hartman was Sterling Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University and Project Director of its Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. His many books include The Third Pillar: Essays in Judaic Studies (2011), A Scholar's Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe (2007), The Geoffrey Hartman Reader (2004, winner, Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism), Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity (2004), The Fateful Question of Culture (1997), The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (1996), The Unremarkable Wordsworth (1987), Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (1980, 2nd ed., 2007), The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (1975), Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays, 1958-1970 (1970), and Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814 (1964, winner, Christian Gauss Award).

Kevis Goodman (Edited By)
Kevis Goodman is Professor and John F. Hotchkis Chair in English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Pathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics, and Poetics (2023) and Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (2004).

Brian McGrath (Edited By)
Brian McGrath is Professor of English at Clemson University. He is the author of Look Round for Poetry: Untimely Romanticisms (2022) and The Poetics of Unremembered Acts: Reading, Lyric, Pedagogy (2013).