Holocaust and Hope: Literature, Testimony, Media (Lit Z)

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