Holocaust and Hope

Geoffrey Hartman (Author) Geoffrey Hartman was Sterling Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University and Project Director of its Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. His many books include The Third Pillar: Essays in Judaic Studies (2011), A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe (2007), The Geoffrey Hartman Reader (2004, winner, Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism), Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity (2004), The Fateful Question of Culture (1997), The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (1996), The Unremarkable Wordsworth (1987), Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (1980, 2nd ed., 2007), The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (1975), Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays, 1958–1970 (1970), and Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (1964, winner, Christian Gauss Award).Kevis Goodman (Edited By) Kevis Goodman is Professor and John F. Hotchkis Chair in English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Pathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics, and Poetics (2023) and Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (2004).Brian McGrath (Edited By) Brian McGrath is Professor of English at Clemson University. He is the author of Look Round for Poetry: Untimely Romanticisms (2022) and The Poetics of Unremembered Acts: Reading, Lyric, Pedagogy (2013).

• Introduction: The Limits of Realism and the Future of Witness 11 Shoah and Intellectual Witness 202 Holocaust and Hope 333 Words Not from on High 474 Wounded Time: The Holocaust, Jedwabne, and Disaster Writing 525 Elie Wiesel and the Morality of Fiction 596 Afterword to Lodz Ghetto 667 Unbearable Truths 718 Breaking with Every Star: On Literary Knowledge 799 Learning from Survivors 9410 Public Memory and Its Discontents 10711 Shoah Literature: The Universal Aspect 12012 Defining a Living Genre: The Survivor Testimony 13113 The Ethics of Witness: An Interview with Ian Balfour and Rebecca Comay 14014 Terror and Art: A Meditation 16015 Future Memory: Reflections on Holocaust Testimony and Yale’s Fortunoff Video Archive 172Acknowledgments 183Notes 185Index 221

"In this beautifully composed volume Geoffrey Hartman explores the important place of ‘literary knowledge’ in the aftermath of the Holocaust, insisting on the non-redemptive hope borne by an imaginative language that watches over ‘absent meaning.’ Framed by an excellent introduction and punctuated by an illuminating interview, Hartman’s irreplaceable voice, returning posthumously to us at our own moment of political and ethical crisis, calls upon us to refuse the emptying out of language and thought typical of totalitarian movements and to find the future-oriented words that, like stars, can still have ‘an independent existence, that hang glittering in the firmament of discourse.’" - Cathy Caruth, Cornell University