Holocaust and Hope

Literature, Testimony, Media

Geoffrey Hartman, Kevis Goodman, Brian McGrath

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781531512217
  9781531512200
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781531512224
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: The Limits of Realism and the Future of Witness
• 1. Shoah and Intellectual Witness
• 2. Holocaust and Hope
• 3. Words Not from on High
• 4. Wounded Time: The Holocaust, Jedwabne, and Disaster Writing
• 5. Elie Wiesel and the Morality of Fiction
• 6. Afterword to Lodz Ghetto
• 7. Unbearable Truths
• 8. Breaking with Every Star: On Literary Knowledge
• 9. Learning from Survivors
• 10. Public Memory and Its Discontents
• 11. Shoah Literature: The Universal Aspect
• 12. Defining a Living Genre: The Survivor Testimony
• 13. The Ethics of Witness: An Interview with Ian Balfour and Rebecca Comay
• 14. Terror and Art: A Meditation
• 15. Future Memory: Reflections on Holocaust Testimony and Yale’s Fortunoff Video Archive
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author