oGeoffrey Hartman seems to me one of the most important literary critics and theorists in the world.He is an exceptionally deep and decent thinker. I believe that his book will be a landmark.o -Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University oThe Geoffrey Hartman Reader is long overdue.Geoffrey Hartman has been a major literary/cultural figure since the late 1950s and his energies continue unabated.o -Stanley Fish,University of Illinois at Chicago oThe Geoffrey Hartman Reader is a triumph.o -Frances Ferguson,University of Chicago Geoffrey Hartman is a pivotal figure in twentieth-century literary thinking, especially in literary theory and its transformation into such fields as Holocaust studies, trauma studies, and work on witnessing and testimony. The essays in this reader, preceded by an important autobiographical introduction, present the full range of Hartman?s interests, which cover almost the entire field of contemporary literature and cultureufrom poetry through psychoanalysis and 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 that could travel from one civilization to another and could satisfy safely rather than exacerbate self-destructively the repetitive human drive to reverse time and exact apocalyptic vengeance.