European Literature

Pairing the two concepts of diaspora and modernism, Allison Schachter formulates a novel approach to modernist studies and diasporic cultural production. Diasporic Modernisms illuminates the formal and historical aspects of displaced Jewish writers—including S. Y. Abramovitsh, Yosef Chaim Brenner, Dovid Bergelson, Leah Goldberg, Gabreil Preil, and Kadia Molodowsky—who grappled with statelessness and the uncertain status of Yiddish and Hebrew. Schachter examines how the relationships between migrant writers and dispersed readers were registered in the innovative practices of modernist prose fiction, capturing the aesthetic conditioned by diaspora, spanning from 1894 to 1974. This literary culture developed in the wake of Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires’ decline, when Jewish writers and readers immigrated to new centers of modern Jewish culture, including Odessa, Jerusalem, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and New York. Offering the first comparative literary history of Hebrew and Yiddish modernist prose, Diasporic Modernisms argues that these two literary histories can no longer be separated by nationalist and monolingual histories. Instead, the book illuminates how these two literary languages continue to animate each other, even after the creation of a Jewish state, with Hebrew as its national language.

This book reflects on humanistic education by examining the limits of the teachable in this domain. The Goethean motif of the open secret is not a mystery revealed but an utterance not understood, the likely fate of all instruction based purely on authority. This study reviews the pedagogical relationship in the European Bildungsroman from the point of view of the mentor rather than that of the young hero, but it also extends beyond the novel to encompass works in which the category of fiction has a crucial and constitutive function, for a growing awareness of limited authority on the part of the mentor figures is closely related to fictive self-consciousness in the texts. Rousseau's semi-novelised treatise, Emile, is relatively unaware of the fictive nature of its own authority; whereas in Sterne, Wieland, Goethe, and Nietzsche, the situation is reversed, culminating in the conscious impasse of authority in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. While all these latter writers achieve their impact despite, indeed because of their internal scepticism, in the three subsequent writers, Lawrence, Leavis, and Coetzee, the impasse becomes more literal as the authority of Bildung is eroded in the wider culture. Yet in all cases, awareness of pedagogical authority as a species of fiction, to be exercised in an aesthetic spirit, is a significant prophylactic against the perennial pressure of reductive conceptions of education as instructional ‘production’.