You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Marcel Proust once wrote, “There is no longer anybody, not even myself, since I cannot leave my bed, who will go along the Rue du Repos to visit the little Jewish cemetery where my grandfather, following a custom that he never understood, went for so many years to lay a stone on his parents’ grave.” Investigating the origin and significance of this statement, Antoine Compagnon offers new insight into the great author’s underappreciated Jewish side. Compagnon traces Proust’s ties to the French Jewish community, examining his relations with his mother’s successful and assimilated family, the Weils. He explores how French Jews read and responded to Proust’s masterpiece In Search o...
From one of France’s leading contemporary thinkers, “an astutely reasoned philosophical text, offering a revolutionary analysis of theistic religion” (The Midwest Book Review). This book is a profound and eagerly anticipated investigation into what is left of a monotheistic religious spirit—notably, a minimalist faith that is neither confessional nor credulous. Articulating this faith as works and as an objectless hope, Nancy deconstructs Christianity in search of the historical and reflective conditions that provided its initial energy. Working through Blanchot and Nietzsche, re-reading Heidegger and Derrida, Nancy turns to the Epistle of Saint James rather than those of Saint Paul,...
Revolutionary novelist, historian, anarchist, Bolshevik and dissident-Victor Serge is one of the most compelling figures to have emerged from the history of the Soviet Union. A dedicated activist who joined the Bolsheviks in 1919 and fought in the siege of Petrograd, only to be later consigned to poverty and persecution for rejecting both capitalism and Stalinism, he was a keen observer of his times. Carefully wrought and meticulously researched, Susan Weissman's Victor Serge is the definitive biography of an extraordinary man.
Building on work by Aristotle, Jacques Lacan, and Harold Bloom, Adrianna M. Paliyenko's richly textured study revises our previous understanding of Arthur Rimbaud's (1854-1891) indirect artistic influence on Paul Claudel (1868-1955). Paliyenko's analysis answers to critical readings that rely on speculative spiritual affinities and text-surface similarities in identifying Claudel as Rimbaud's artistic follower. She traces the two writers' development of the poetic subject, striving to map Claudel's "creative corrections," or revisions, of Rimbaud's work. In redirecting discussion of Rimbaud's work, she develops a Bloomian paradigm of how creative artists strive for originality by correcting or revising their predecessors.
Baudelaire’s Bitter Metaphysics: Anti-Nihilist Readings by Fondane, Benjamin, and Sartre reconstructs a philosophical trialogue that might have been expected to take place between Benjamin Fondane, Walter Benjamin, and Jean-Paul Sartre over their philosophical readings of Charles Baudelaire, an exchange preempted by the untimely deaths of two of the interlocutors during the Nazi holocaust. Why did three of Europe’s sharpest minds respond to the terror of 1933-45 by writing about a long-dead poet? Aaron Brice Cummings argues that Fondane, Benjamin, and Sartre turned to the poet of nihilism’s abyss because they recognized a fact of cultural history that remains relevant today: until sometime in the 2080s, the literary world will have to confront (even if to deny) the two-century window forecast by Nietzsche as the age of cultural and existential nihilism. Accordingly, the author examines the bitter metaphysics latent in Baudelaire’s motifs of the abyss, clocks, brutes, streets, and bored dandies. In so doing, this book confronts the nothingness which modern life encounters in the heart of art, ethics, ideality, time, memory, history, urban life, and religion.
This volume deals with the significance of the avant-garde(s) for modern Jewish culture and the impact of the Jewish tradition on the artistic production of the avant-garde, be they reinterpretations of literary, artistic, philosophical or theological texts/traditions, or novel theoretical openings linked to elements from Judaism or Jewish culture, thought, or history.
In Lev Shestov: Existential Philosopher and Religious Thinker, Michael Finkenthal explores the evolution of Lev Shestov's philosophical and religious intellectual contributions. The hermeneutical effort is mainly based on the Shestovian oeuvre, but his thought is considered in light of existential philosophies in their evolution from Pascal, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard to those of the twentieth century. Shestov's «deconstruction» of philosophy is discussed parallel to the analysis of the formation of his religious thought and its relevancy in the context of efforts by Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas to redefine Judaism.
Provides a listing available of books, articles, and book reviews concerned with French literature since 1885. This work is a reference source in the study of modern French literature and culture. The bibliography is divided into three major divisions: general studies, author subjects (arranged alphabetically), and cinema.
An anthology of thrillers and chillers from 19th Century France. In Theophile Gautier's The Dead in Love, a man develops an obsessive passion for a woman who has returned from the grave, while Honore de Balzac's The Red Inn is on a crime which is committed by one person in thought and another in deed.
The articles in this collection originated from an international symposium at the University of Haifa and centre around a major topic in German, European and American literature, i.e. the way in which Jewish self-definition, both positive and negative, has materialized as a product of the tensions between secular culture and society on the one hand, and Jewish tradition and religion on the other. The broad range of authors (most of them of German-speaking origin) necessarily results in an almost equally broad range of answers to this central question. The volume is dedicated to the memory of the Israeli literary scholar Chaim Shoham.