Witnessing Video Testimony: An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman

Geoffrey Hartman's role as co-founder of Yale University's Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies and his continued involvement with the Archive have provided the catalyst for his work on video testimony. While such considerations may seem far from the studies of Wordsworth that marked the beginning of his career, an interest in vision and the visual, as well as a concern with literature and the aesthetic, manifests itself in both his early and his more recent work. I interviewed him in the summer of 1999 on the Fortunoff Archive, the question of video testimony in general, and the role such testimony can have in education, particularly literary education.