Fantasies of Witnessing explores how and why those deeply interested in the Holocaust, yet with no direct, familial connection to it, endeavor to experience it vicariously through sites or texts designed to make it "real" for nonwitnesses. Gary Weissman argues that far from overwhelming nonwitnesses with its magnitude of horror, the Holocaust threatens to feel distant and unreal. A prevailing rhetoric of "secondary" memory and trauma, he contends, and efforts to portray the Holocaust as an immediate and personal experience, are responses to an encroaching sense of unreality: "In America, we...

In The Writer in the Well: On Misreading and Rewriting Literature, Gary Weissman argues that the analysis of literature is fundamentally a writing-based practice, a practice in which the process of writing functions as a way of discovering one's interpretation (or "rewriting") of a text. Weissman takes readers inside Ira Sher's short story, "The Man in the Well," and uses his students' wide variety of interpretive responses to ask foundational questions about composition and interpretation: How is writing, rather than reading alone, central to literary interpretation? How does a...

In The Writer in the Well: On Misreading and Rewriting Literature, Gary Weissman argues that the analysis of literature is fundamentally a writing-based practice, a practice in which the process of writing functions as a way of discovering one's interpretation (or "rewriting") of a text. Weissman takes readers inside Ira Sher's short story, "The Man in the Well," and uses his students' wide variety of interpretive responses to ask foundational questions about composition and interpretation: How is writing, rather than reading alone, central to literary interpretation? How does a...