Description: A final work by one of our major critics, contemplating how acts of distant witnessing can continue in future generations.
Brief description: 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).
Review Quotes: 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