You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book carefully examines the work of Primo Levi, one of the premier survivor-writers of the Holocaust and one of the outstanding Italian writers of the twentieth century. Artists, writers, and educators have all turned to Levi's writing as a source of inspiration and wisdom in coping with the tragedy of the Holocaust. Until recently, however, there have been few book-length works in English on Levi. This collection of essays from an international group of writers aims to bring greater critical attention to Levi's work by exploring all aspects of his oeuvre, including his science-fiction writings and his poetry, as well as his fictional and nonfictional writings about the Holocaust. Interdisciplinary in nature, this collection includes literary, psychoanalytic, linguistic, and historical approaches to Levi's work.
Narrative & Imperative is the first book in English on Italian Holocaust writing as a whole. Risa Sodi explores the work of eight representative authors, including the internationally famous (Primo Levi, Giorgio Bassani, and Elsa Morante) and the lesser known (Giacomo Debenedetti, Paolo Maurensig, Liana Millu, Bruno Piazza, and Giuliana Tedeschi). She examines issues of genre, language, gender, and facticity while situating the works studied within the fields of European and Holocaust letters. A brief history of the Italian Jews - the oldest Jewish community in Europe - opens the book, and the conclusion brings the study up to recent times.
Why writing in captivity is a vitally important form of literary resistance Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy as a prisoner condemned to death for treason, circumstances that are reflected in the themes and concerns of its evocative poetry and dialogue between the prisoner and his mentor, Lady Philosophy. This classic philosophical statement of late antiquity has had an enduring influence on Western thought. It is also the earliest example of what Rivkah Zim identifies as a distinctive and vitally important medium of literary resistance: writing in captivity by prisoners of conscience and persecuted minorities. The Consolations of Writing reveals why the great contributors to this...
Honorable Mention for the 2019 American Association for Italian American Book Prize (20-21st Centuries) Allied Encounters uniquely explores Anglo-American and Italian literary, cinematic, and military representations of World War II Italy in order to trace, critique, and move beyond the gendered paradigm of redemption that has conditioned understandings of the Allied–Italian encounter. The arrival of the Allies’ global forces in an Italy torn by civil war brought together populations that had long mythologized one another, yet “liberation” did not prove to be the happy ending touted by official rhetoric. Instead of a “honeymoon,” the Allied–Italian encounter in cities such as N...
This book explores the application of the work of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben to the post-Arab Uprisings in the Middle East, considering the evolution of regime-society relations that ultimately erupted in violence in the early months of 2011. Agamben's ideas of the state of exception and bare life provide important intellectual tools to understand the nature of sovereignty and the regulation of life, which has largely been missing in the study of the region. Filling a theoretical and empirical gap by exploring the concept of the 'state of exception' via a multidisciplinary approach, Simon Mabon, Sanaa Alsarghali and contributors in the fields of political science, law and philosophy offer a unique set of perspectives analysing how politics and law combine to facilitate the misuse of executive powers.
Now available in paperback for the first time, Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century is both a comprehensive reference resource and a springboard for further study. This volume: examines canonical Jewish writers, less well-known authors of Yiddish and Hebrew, and emerging Israeli writers includes entries on figures as diverse as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, and Woody Allen contains introductory essays on Jewish-American writing, Holocaust literature and memoirs, Yiddish writing, and Anglo-Jewish literature provides a chronology of twentieth-century Jewish writers. Compiled by expert contributors, this book contains over 330 entries on individual authors, each consisting of a biography, a list of selected publications, a scholarly essay on their work and suggestions for further reading.
Essays on novelists who conveyed through various modes of narration and contrasting viewpoints the social and political realities in which they lived, identifying the war as the cause of those realities. Discusses how the fall of Fascism allowed writers and film-makers freedom of expression but also challenged them with the new realities of national life. During this period Neorealism was first widely applied to the novel as well as cinema.
In this study of Primo Levi's 'If This is a Man (Se questo è un uomo)', the author tries to give some sense of the historical and cultural context not just of Levi's book, but also of the events which gave rise to it, since it is to those events that Levi is directing us. For the same reason, suggestions for further reading mainly concentrate on history. While looking at some of the many literary influences on Levi's book, particularly that of Dante's Inferno, this book also places it in the literature of survivor accounts. The author has drawn widely on Levi's other writings, both because If This is a Man has to be seen as the beginning of a lifetime's endeavour, and because, in the absence of a definitive body of criticism, Levi remains the best explicator of his own work.This book is intended both for the student of Italian and for the general reader. All quotations from If This is a Man and all verse quotations are given both in Italian and in English, while all other quotations from Italian texts are given in English.
In literary and cultural studies today, the term "the Other" appears to have largely lost its moorings in the primacy of the intersubjective encounter, focusing rather on the social construction of the Other. For Emmanuel Levinas, in contrast, the Other is precisely that which eludes construction and categorization. In a study that ranges from literature of ancient China, Greece, and Israel to modern Egypt, Italy, West Africa, and America, Steven Shankman tests Levinas's ideas by reading literary works from outside the Judeo-Christian orbit for figurations equivalent to Levinas's notion of the Other. He also places ethics at the center of intercultural—or, in his words, "transcultural"—comparative literature. In contemporary literary and cultural studies, it is often assumed that culture has the last word. However, as Levinas insists—and as Shankman argues throughout this book—it is ethics that is the "presupposition of all Culture," that is situated "before Culture."
Judith Kelly looks at Levi's work in the context of testimonial literature and examines the linguistic expression of the author's Auschwitz experience. The moral and philosophical nature of humanity within the camp is investigated. In particular, there is a comparison between If this is Man and a co-authored medico-scientific report, and a consideration of sources and motifs which provide the cultural framework for the authors expression of his experiences.