Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification
Title | Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification PDF eBook |
Author | Neil Levi |
Publisher | Fordham Univ Press |
Pages | 237 |
Release | 2013-11-01 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 0823255077 |
Why were modernist works of art, literature, and music that were neither by nor about Jews nevertheless interpreted as Jewish? In this book, Neil Levi explores how the antisemitic fantasy of a mobile, dangerous, contagious Jewish spirit unfolds in the antimodernist polemics of Richard Wagner, Max Nordau, Wyndham Lewis, and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, reaching its apotheosis in the notorious 1937 Nazi exhibition “Degenerate Art.” Levi then turns to James Joyce, Theodor W. Adorno, and Samuel Beckett, offering radical new interpretations of these modernist authors to show how each presents his own poetics as a self-conscious departure from the modern antisemitic imaginary. Levi claims that, just as antisemites once feared their own contamination by a mobile, polluting Jewish spirit, so too much of postwar thought remains governed by the fear that it might be contaminated by the spirit of antisemitism. Thus he argues for the need to confront and work through our own fantasies and projections—not only about the figure of the Jew but also about that of the antisemite.
Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification
Title | Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification PDF eBook |
Author | Neil Jonathan Levi |
Publisher | |
Pages | 414 |
Release | 2013 |
Genre | LITERARY CRITICISM |
ISBN | 9780823260867 |
"This book argues that the antisemitic interpretation of modernist form as a symptom of a mobile, contagious Jewish spirit needs to be treated as integral to the history of European modernism. The notion of modernist form as Jewified lies at the heart of both a certain modernism's hostile reception, and its self-conception"--
Unfit: Jewish Degeneration and Modernism
Title | Unfit: Jewish Degeneration and Modernism PDF eBook |
Author | Marilyn Reizbaum |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Pages | 241 |
Release | 2019-09-19 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1350098957 |
An obsession with “degeneration” was a central preoccupation of modernist culture at the start of the 20th century. Less attention has been paid to the fact that many of the key thinkers in “degeneration theory” – including Cesare Lombroso, Max Nordau, and Magnus Hirschfeld – were Jewish. Unfit: Jewish Degeneration and Modernism is the first in-depth study of the Jewish cultural roots of this strand of modernist thought and its legacies for modernist and contemporary culture. Marilyn Reizbaum explores how literary works from Bram Stoker's Dracula, through James Joyce's Ulysses to Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, the crime movies of Mervyn LeRoy, and the photography of Claude Cahun and Adi Nes manifest engagements with ideas of degeneration across the arts of the 20th century. This is a major new study that sheds new light on modernist thought, art and culture.
The Problem of the Actress in Modern German Theater and Thought
Title | The Problem of the Actress in Modern German Theater and Thought PDF eBook |
Author | S. E. Jackson |
Publisher | Boydell & Brewer |
Pages | 247 |
Release | 2021 |
Genre | Actresses |
ISBN | 1640140867 |
Around 1900, German and Austrian actresses had allure and status, apparent autonomy, and unconventional lifestyles. They presented a complex problem socially and aesthetically, one tied to the so-called Woman Question and to the contested status of modernity. For modernists, the actress's socioeconomic mobility and defiance of gender norms opened space to contest social and moral strictures, and her mutability offered a means to experiment with identity. For conservatives, on the other hand, female performance could support antifeminist convictions and validate masculine authority by positing woman as nothing but a false surface shaped by productive male forces. Influential male-authored texts from the period thereby disavowed female subjectivity per se by equating "woman" and "actress." S. E. Jackson establishes the actress as a key figure in a discursive matrix surrounding modernity, gender, and subjectivity. Her central argument is that because the figure of the actress bridged such varied fields of thought, women who were actresses had a consequential impact that resonated in and far beyond the theater - but has not been explored. Examining archival sources such as theater reviews and writing by actresses in direct relation to canonical aesthetic and philosophical texts, The Problem of the Actress reconstructs the constitutive role that womenplayed on and off the stage in shaping not only modernist theater aesthetics and performance practices, but also influential strains of modern thought.
Jewish American Writing and World Literature
Title | Jewish American Writing and World Literature PDF eBook |
Author | Saul Noam Zaritt |
Publisher | Oxford University Press, USA |
Pages | 252 |
Release | 2020-07-23 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0198863713 |
This book explores how Jewish American writers like Sholem Asch, Jacob Glatstein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anna Margolin, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley think of themselves as world writers, and the successes and failures that come with this role.
Modernist Time Ecology
Title | Modernist Time Ecology PDF eBook |
Author | Jesse Matz |
Publisher | Johns Hopkins University Press |
Pages | 321 |
Release | 2018-12-03 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1421426994 |
Modernist Time Ecology is a deeply interdisciplinary book that changes what we think literature and the arts can do for the world at large.
Bodies of Modernism
Title | Bodies of Modernism PDF eBook |
Author | Maren Linett |
Publisher | University of Michigan Press |
Pages | 269 |
Release | 2017 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0472053310 |
Reveals the links, both positive and negative, between disabled bodies and aspects of modernism and modernity through readings of a wide range of literary texts