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.