The Geoffrey Hartman Reader
This book can be opened with
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.
...an unexpected, secret gift...arrives on every page of The Geoffrey Hartman Reader.---—The Cambridge Quarterly
“The Geoffrey Hartman Reader is long overdue. Geoffrey Hartman has been
---—Stanley Fish, University of Illinois at Chicago
a major literary/cultural figure since the late 1950s and his energies
continue unabated.”
“The Geoffrey Hartman Reader is a triumph.”---—Frances Ferguson, University of Chicago
“Geoffrey Hartman seems to me one of the most important literary critics and
---—Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University
theorists in the world.He is an exceptionally deep and decent thinker. I believe
that his book will be a landmark.”