- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804762007
- eISBN:
- 9780804775021
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804762007.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter discusses the Hebrew and Yiddish meta-literary thinking of literary scholars and historians between the end of World War I and the first years of Israeli independence. This meta-literary ...
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This chapter discusses the Hebrew and Yiddish meta-literary thinking of literary scholars and historians between the end of World War I and the first years of Israeli independence. This meta-literary thinking organized itself along two axes, a vertical and a horizontal one. Those with a proclivity for thinking vertically were intrigued by the questions of whether and how the literature retained a unifying common denominator as it evolved throughout the epochs and eras predicated upon one or another paradigm of periodization. They were mostly Hebrew scholars who studied the development of Hebrew literature. Those whose thinking gravitated toward the horizontal axis, mostly non-Hebraic scholars, with Yiddishists at their head, tended to think in spatial terms and look for patterns of significant simultaneity in Jewish writing. The scholar who more than anybody attempted to conflate the two axes was Sadan, whose vast scholarly project was divided between the canonical new Hebrew and Yiddish literatures, and at the same time also between canonical literatures and their sub-canonical extensions, such as writing that belonged in the space between literature and folklore, historiography and linguistics.Less
This chapter discusses the Hebrew and Yiddish meta-literary thinking of literary scholars and historians between the end of World War I and the first years of Israeli independence. This meta-literary thinking organized itself along two axes, a vertical and a horizontal one. Those with a proclivity for thinking vertically were intrigued by the questions of whether and how the literature retained a unifying common denominator as it evolved throughout the epochs and eras predicated upon one or another paradigm of periodization. They were mostly Hebrew scholars who studied the development of Hebrew literature. Those whose thinking gravitated toward the horizontal axis, mostly non-Hebraic scholars, with Yiddishists at their head, tended to think in spatial terms and look for patterns of significant simultaneity in Jewish writing. The scholar who more than anybody attempted to conflate the two axes was Sadan, whose vast scholarly project was divided between the canonical new Hebrew and Yiddish literatures, and at the same time also between canonical literatures and their sub-canonical extensions, such as writing that belonged in the space between literature and folklore, historiography and linguistics.
Bruno Chaouat
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781781383346
- eISBN:
- 9781786944092
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781383346.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
For at least fifteen years, any keen observer of European society has been aware that antisemitism is no longer a matter of racial theory, nationalism, or exclusion of the “other.” While in the past ...
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For at least fifteen years, any keen observer of European society has been aware that antisemitism is no longer a matter of racial theory, nationalism, or exclusion of the “other.” While in the past antisemites saw Jews as all too modern “rootless cosmopolitans” today's European antisemitism construes them as obsolete precisely because they are attached to their roots, their land, their community, their origin. The Jews are now perceived as a reactionary force that hinders the progress of humankind toward multiculturalism, understood as the peaceful, infinitely enriching coexistence of ethnicities, races, religions, and cultures within the same territory. The antisemite of yore viewed the Jews as an inferior race; today he views them as racist. By looking back to the emergence of a postwar theoretical discourse on trauma, memory, victims, suffering, the Holocaust and the Jews, Is Theory Good for the Jews? explores how “French thought” is implicated in intellectual, literary and ideological components of the global and local upsurge of antisemitism. The author probes the legacy of Heidegger in France and exposes the shortcomings of radical social critique and postcolonial theory confronted to the challenge of Islamic terrorism and Jew hatred. This book is the first effort to analyze French responses that have regrettably played their part in generating the new antisemitism.Less
For at least fifteen years, any keen observer of European society has been aware that antisemitism is no longer a matter of racial theory, nationalism, or exclusion of the “other.” While in the past antisemites saw Jews as all too modern “rootless cosmopolitans” today's European antisemitism construes them as obsolete precisely because they are attached to their roots, their land, their community, their origin. The Jews are now perceived as a reactionary force that hinders the progress of humankind toward multiculturalism, understood as the peaceful, infinitely enriching coexistence of ethnicities, races, religions, and cultures within the same territory. The antisemite of yore viewed the Jews as an inferior race; today he views them as racist. By looking back to the emergence of a postwar theoretical discourse on trauma, memory, victims, suffering, the Holocaust and the Jews, Is Theory Good for the Jews? explores how “French thought” is implicated in intellectual, literary and ideological components of the global and local upsurge of antisemitism. The author probes the legacy of Heidegger in France and exposes the shortcomings of radical social critique and postcolonial theory confronted to the challenge of Islamic terrorism and Jew hatred. This book is the first effort to analyze French responses that have regrettably played their part in generating the new antisemitism.
Peter Flueckiger
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804761574
- eISBN:
- 9780804776394
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804761574.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
Many intellectuals in eighteenth-century Japan valued classical poetry in either Chinese or Japanese for its expression of unadulterated human sentiments. They also saw such poetry as a distillation ...
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Many intellectuals in eighteenth-century Japan valued classical poetry in either Chinese or Japanese for its expression of unadulterated human sentiments. They also saw such poetry as a distillation of the language and aesthetic values of ancient China and Japan, which offered models of the good government and social harmony lacking in their time. By studying the poetry of the past and composing new poetry emulating its style, they believed it possible to reform their own society. This book focuses on the development of these ideas in the life and work of Ogyu Sorai, the most influential Confucian philosopher of the eighteenth century, and that of his key disciples and critics. This study contends that the literary thought of these figures needs to be understood not just for what it has to say about the composition of poetry, but as a form of political and philosophical discourse. Unlike other works on this literature, this book argues that the increased valorization of human emotions in eighteenth-century literary thought went hand in hand with new demands for how emotions were to be regulated and socialized, and that literary and political thought of the time were thus not at odds but inextricably linked.Less
Many intellectuals in eighteenth-century Japan valued classical poetry in either Chinese or Japanese for its expression of unadulterated human sentiments. They also saw such poetry as a distillation of the language and aesthetic values of ancient China and Japan, which offered models of the good government and social harmony lacking in their time. By studying the poetry of the past and composing new poetry emulating its style, they believed it possible to reform their own society. This book focuses on the development of these ideas in the life and work of Ogyu Sorai, the most influential Confucian philosopher of the eighteenth century, and that of his key disciples and critics. This study contends that the literary thought of these figures needs to be understood not just for what it has to say about the composition of poetry, but as a form of political and philosophical discourse. Unlike other works on this literature, this book argues that the increased valorization of human emotions in eighteenth-century literary thought went hand in hand with new demands for how emotions were to be regulated and socialized, and that literary and political thought of the time were thus not at odds but inextricably linked.
Kevis Goodman
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- October 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780190254087
- eISBN:
- 9780190254117
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190254087.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The introduction situates the argument of this book in relation to four recent books: My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity; On the Psychotheology of Everyday ...
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The introduction situates the argument of this book in relation to four recent books: My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity; On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig; On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald; and The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty. Together, these five books articulate a consistent, overarching critical and theoretical project concerned with the pressures that structure psychic and political life in modernity, and with the remains of religion and political theology within an apparently secular world. In particular, the introduction charts the emergence of the central concept of the “flesh,” while also discussing its significance. It then concludes with reflections on the distinctive methodology that conjoins political theory and political economy with psychoanalytic and literary thinking.Less
The introduction situates the argument of this book in relation to four recent books: My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity; On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig; On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald; and The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty. Together, these five books articulate a consistent, overarching critical and theoretical project concerned with the pressures that structure psychic and political life in modernity, and with the remains of religion and political theology within an apparently secular world. In particular, the introduction charts the emergence of the central concept of the “flesh,” while also discussing its significance. It then concludes with reflections on the distinctive methodology that conjoins political theory and political economy with psychoanalytic and literary thinking.
