Geoffrey Hartman is a pivotal figure in twentieth-century literary thinking,
especially in literary theory and its transformation into such fields as Holocaust studies, trauma studies, and work on witnessing and testimony. The essays in this reader, preceded by an important autobiographical introduction, present the full range of Hartman’s interests, which cover almost the entire field of contemporary literature and culture—from poetry through psychoanalysis and trauma studies to midrash and the media revolution.
Throughout his career, starting with his earliest books on Romantic literature,
Hartman has interrogated the possibility of a healing culture of vision, one that could travel from one civilization to another and could satisfy safely rather than exacerbate self-destructively the repetitive human drive to reverse time and exact apocalyptic vengeance.