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Full Description
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.
Contents
Introduction: The Limits of Realism and the Future of Witness 1
1 Shoah and Intellectual Witness 20
2 Holocaust and Hope 33
3 Words Not from on High 47
4 Wounded Time: The Holocaust, Jedwabne, and Disaster Writing 52
5 Elie Wiesel and the Morality of Fiction 59
6 Afterword to Lodz Ghetto 66
7 Unbearable Truths 71
8 Breaking with Every Star: On Literary Knowledge 79
9 Learning from Survivors 94
10 Public Memory and Its Discontents 107
11 Shoah Literature: The Universal Aspect 120
12 Defining a Living Genre: The Survivor Testimony 131
13 The Ethics of Witness: An Interview with Ian Balfour and Rebecca Comay 140
14 Terror and Art: A Meditation 160
15 Future Memory: Reflections on Holocaust Testimony and Yale's Fortunoff Video Archive 172
Acknowledgments 183
Notes 185
Index 221
