Geoffrey Hartman is a pivotal figure in twentieth-century literary thinking,especially in literary theory and its transformation into such fields as Holocauststudies, trauma studies, and work
on witnessing and testimony. The essays inthis reader, preceded by an important autobiographical introduction, presentthe full range of Hartman’s interests, which cover almost the entire field
ofcontemporary literature and culture-from poetry through psychoanalysisand 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 thatcould travel from one civilization to another and could satisfy safely rather thanexacerbate
self-destructively the repetitive human drive to reverse time andexact apocalyptic vengeance.
