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The Seductions of Biography is an important volume which sheds new light on a flourishing literary form, the biography. In postmodern culture, new methods and intentions emerge, as well as new obstacles, towards our understanding of biography as a genre. This book provides a thorough exploration of this genre, from a wide range of postmodern perspectives. The Seductions of Biography brings together a number of essays which reflect in culturally critical as well as autobiographical terms on current themes and practices of contemporary biography. Issues addressed by these essays focus on the postmodern dilemma itself--as new voices from excluded communities make themselves heard in biographica...
A study of the historical origins of cultural criticism in the novel since the mid-19th century, using the critical theory of the Frankfurt School to declare the critical force of mass culture as crucial to the making of the modern novel. Discusses how mass audiences and politics presented problems to major novelists and how they responded in their writings and lives. Paper edition (unseen), $19.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Michael Keren traces the political lives and messages of some of the twentieth century's greatest literary characters in this insightful and jargon-free book of literary criticism. He observes the infamous characters ranging from Joseph K from Franz Kafka's The Trial to Ralph from William Golding's Lord of the Flies to Chauncey Gardiner from Jerzy Kosinski's Being There and beyond while they struggle through their lives and world events. The Citizen's Voice is a refreshing contribution to civil society theory that makes a pioneering effort to cross the boundaries between politics, literature, and culture. A study of the human condition via literature this book expounds the key features of a good citizen while offering a perfect discussion piece for courses in political theory, politics and literature, and history.
The Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanization of the Shoah, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words – Khurbn Yiddish, or “Yiddish of the Holocaust” – puzzled and intrigued the East European Jews who were experiencing the metamorphosis of their own tongue in real time. Sensing that Khurbn Yiddish words harbored profound truths about what Jews endured during the Holocaust, some Yiddish speakers threw themselves into compiling dictionaries and glos...
There is an academic cottage industry on the "Jewish Freud," aiming to detect Jewish influences on Freud, his own feelings about being Jewish, and suppressed traces of Jewishness in his thought. This book takes a different approach, turning its gaze not on Freud but rather on those who seek out his concealed Jewishness. What is it that propels the scholarly aim to show Freud in a Jewish light? Naomi Seidman explores attempts to "touch" Freud (and other famous Jews) through Jewish languages, seeking out his Hebrew name or evidence that he knew some Yiddish. Tracing a history of this drive to bring Freud into Jewish range, Seidman also charts Freud's responses to (and jokes about) this desire. More specifically, she reads the reception and translation of Freud in Hebrew and Yiddish as instances of the desire to touch, feel, "rescue," and connect with the famous Professor from Vienna.
Twenty-nine collected essays represent a critical history of Shakespeare's play as text and as theater, beginning with Samuel Johnson in 1765, and ending with a review of the Royal Shakespeare Company production in 1991. The criticism centers on three aspects of the play: the love/friendship debate.
This book shows that the connected histories of decolonization and globalization concern the practices of individuals and movements as much as they do the ideologies of states, institutions and organizations. Viewing decolonization through non-state activist practices, and setting anti-colonial solidarity in the context of the methods of contemporary global peace movements, it argues that seemingly marginal histories can illuminate aspects of the end of empire that are not readily apparent in studies centred on state diplomacy and nationalist movements. Focusing on a group of British and American activists, including the pacifist campaigner A.J. Muste, the anti-apartheid priest Michael Scott...
After Franz Kafka died in 1924, his novels and short stories were published in ways that downplayed both their author's roots in Prague and his engagement with Jewish tradition and language, so as to secure their place in the German literary canon. Now, nearly a century after Kafka began to create his fictions, Germany, Israel, and the Czech Republic lay claim to his legacy. Kafka's Jewish Languages brings Kafka's stature as a specifically Jewish writer into focus. David Suchoff explores the Yiddish and modern Hebrew that inspired Kafka's vision of tradition. Citing the Jewish sources crucial to the development of Kafka's style, the book demonstrates the intimate relationship between the aut...
This book explores Kafka's sometimes surprising connections with key Italian writers, from Italo Calvino to Elena Ferrante, who shaped Italy's modern literary landscape.
When the American Bar Association recreated the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg on the fortieth anniversary of their execution, the jury acquitted the "mock Rosenbergs," finding that in today's courts they would not have been convicted of espionage. The 1950s trial of the Rosenbergs on charges of "Atomic Spying" and "stealing the secrets of the Atomic bomb" was a major event of Cold War America, galvanizing public opinion on all sides of the question. Secret Agents presents essays by lawyers, cultural critics, social historians and historians of science, as well as a reconsideration of the Rosenbergs by their younger son, Robert Meeropol. Secret Agents gives new resonance to a history we have for too long been willing to forget.