Holocaust and Hope: Literature, Testimony, Media

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 (Author)
GEOFFREY HARTMAN is Sterling Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Yale and Project Director of its Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. His most recent books are The Geoffrey Hartman Reader (Fordham), winner of the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism in Honor of Newton Arvin; Scars of the Spirit; The Longest Shadow; and a new edition of Criticism in the Wilderness.

Brian McGrath (Edited By)
Brian McGrath is Associate Professor of English at Clemson University. He is the author of The Poetics of Unremembered Acts: Reading, Lyric, Pedagogy.