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.