Ghosts

2021 ◽  
pp. 116-168
Author(s):  
Andrew Dean
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Philip Roth ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Political Judgement ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Literary Archive ◽  
Ethnic Categorization

This chapter examines how Philip Roth responds to Jewish American readers and contexts in his fiction. Roth exploits the tensions and transitions in Jewish American political aspirations in the period, setting heated political debates about assimilation and particularism against different measurements of value in the novel. By using live cultural debates from the period, Roth courts ethnic categorization, while ultimately relativizing such categories in his attempt to pursue alternative understandings of literary value. In Roth’s earlier ‘Nathan Zuckerman’ fictions, the comedy and intelligence emerge through his practice of contrasting the ‘humble needs’ of a desiring body with the rush either to pass political judgement or to withdraw the novel from the complications of embodied life. The second half of the chapter demonstrates how Roth engages both directly and indirectly with the work of Hannah Arendt and the 1950s context for thinking about the Holocaust. This section of the chapter focuses in particular on an unpublished screenplay housed in Roth’s literary archive.

Metafiction and the Postwar Novel

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Dean
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Philip Roth ◽  
Miguel De Cervantes ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
History Of ◽  
Janet Frame ◽  
The Relationship

This book examines the origins, poetics, and capacities of self-reflexive fiction across the globe after World War II. Focusing on three authors’ careers—J. M. Coetzee, Janet Frame, and Philip Roth—it seeks to circumvent the large-scale theoretical paradigms (such as ‘postmodernism’) that have long been deployed to describe this writing. The book does so by developing new terms for discussing the intimacies of metafictional writing, derived from the writing of Miguel de Cervantes and J. L. Borges. The ‘self of writing’ refers to the figure of the author that a writer may imagine exists independently from discourse. The ‘public author as signature’ represents the public understandings of an author that emerge from biography and the author’s corpus itself. The book shows how these figures of authorship are handled by authors, as they draw on the materials offered by their own corpora and communities of readers. Sometimes, this book shows, authors invent distinctively literary ways of adjudicating enduring political debates: the responsibility of a novelist to the political aspirations of a community, the ability of the novel to pursue justice on behalf of others, and the public good that literature serves. Yet this is not a story of unmitigated success: the book also demonstrates how metafiction can be used as a way to close down interpretive schemes and to avoid contributing to public value. Through a close focus on literary environments, the book ultimately gives a finer-grained account of the history of postwar metafiction, and offers new ways of theorizing the relationship between fiction, life-writing, and literary institutions.

V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Development ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Derek Walcott ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Kamau Brathwaite ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
History Of ◽  
Principal Subject ◽  
Intellectual Formation

This book presents a new portrait of V.S. Naipaul, one of the twentieth-century’s most controversial writers about colonialism and its aftermath, by looking at his relationship with the Caribbean, the region of his birth. It argues that whilst Naipaul presented himself as a global public intellectual—a citizen of nowhere—his writing and thought was shaped by his Caribbean intellectual formation, and his investment in Caribbean political debates. Focusing on three key forms of Caribbean writing—the novel, the historical narrative, and the travel narrative—it shows how the generic, stylistic, and formal choices of writers had great political significance. Telling the story of his creative and intellectual development at three crucial points in Naipaul’s career, it offers a new intellectual biography of its principal subject. By showing Naipaul’s crucial place in the history of Caribbean ideas, it also provides new perspectives on a number of major writers and thinkers from the region, including C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter, George Lamming, Derek Walcott, Maryse Condé, and David Scott.

Re-presenting Genocide: The Canadian Museum of Human Rights and Settler Colonial Power

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rita Kaur Dhamoon
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Settler Societies ◽  
Forced Movement

AbstractIn settler societies like Canada, United States, and Australia, the bourgeoning discourse that frames colonial violence against Indigenous people as genocide has been controversial, specifically because there is much debate about the meaning and applicability of genocide. Through an analysis of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, this paper analyzes what is revealed about settler colonialism in the nexus of difficult knowledge, curatorial decisions, and political debates about the label of genocide. I specifically examine competing definitions of genocide, the primacy of the Holocaust, the regulatory role of the settler state, and the limits of a human rights framework. My argument is that genocide debates related to Indigenous experiences operationalize a range of governing techniques that extend settler colonialism, even as Indigenous peoples confront existing hegemonies. These techniques include: interpretative denial; promoting an Oppression Olympics and a politics of distancing; regulating difference through state-based recognition and interference; and depoliticizing claims that overshadow continuing practices of assimilation, extermination, criminalization, containment, and forced movement of Indigenous peoples. By pinpointing these techniques, this paper seeks to build on Indigenous critiques of colonialism, challenge settler national narratives of peaceful and lawful origins, and foster ways to build more just relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.

Antisemitic or Bordering on Antisemitic? Grey Areas in Romanian Fake News Discourses in the Wake of the Covid-19 Pandemic

Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 121-127
Author(s):  
Anca-Simina Martin
Keyword(s):  
Influenza Pandemic ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Elie Wiesel ◽  
Working Definition ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Us ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Novel Coronavirus

Jews as a collective have long served as scapegoats for epidemics and pandemics, such as the Bubonic Plague and, according to some scholars, the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic. This practice reemerged in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when more and more fake news outlets in the US and Europe started publishing articles on a perceived linkage between Jewish communities and the novel coronavirus. What this article aims to achieve is to facilitate a dialogue between the observations on the phenomenon made by the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania and the latest related EU reports, with a view to charting its beginnings in Romania in relation to other European countries and in an attempt to see whether Romania, like France and Germany, has witnessed the emergence of “grey area” discourses which are not fully covered by International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism.

scholarly journals Emancipation from the Whirlwind: Piety and Rebellion among Jewish-American Post-Holocaust and Christian Liberation Readings of Job

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
David C Tollerton
Keyword(s):  
Modern World ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Political Opposition ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Theologically Conservative ◽  
State Of Israel ◽  
Political Radicalism ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Do So

This article focuses upon the manner in which the Book of Job’s dissonant messages of theological radicalism and conservatism have been utilised within discussion of two specific episodes of innocent suffering in the modern world – the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust and the suffering of the oppressed in the developing world. Overlaying the discussion, the following model is proposed: that, firstly, Christian liberation theologians emphasise the more theologically conservative messages that can be drawn from Job while asserting radical political opposition to those who possess power. Conversely, Jewish Holocaust theologians empathise with Job’s more theologically radical elements, yet do so within outlooks committed to conservatively maintaining the security and power of the state of Israel after two thousand years of Jewish powerlessness. This model is tested by focusing upon seven treatments of Job associated with liberation or Holocaust theologies. It is concluded that, although there are significant complications, in broad terms the model largely holds ”“ offering a comparative insight into contextual Christian and Jewish interpretations of the Bible in which political radicalism and theological radicalism are found to be at odds with one another.

Seeing “No Guiltless Minds”

2018 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-67
Author(s):  
Noa Reich
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Vicarious Liability ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The Family ◽  
Ancient Law ◽  
Vicarious Experiences ◽  
Corporate Liability ◽  
Legal Theorist

Noa Reich, “Seeing ‘No Guiltless Minds’: Inheritance and Liability in Wilkie Collins’s Armadale” (pp. 30–67) This essay suggests that the articulation of inherited guilt as a type of liability in Wilkie Collins’s Armadale (1866) invites us to reframe inheritance as central both to the Victorian credit economy and to the period’s fictional engagements with the effects of this economy. I begin by examining mid-nineteenth-century legal and political debates about limited corporate liability and estate debts, as well as legal theorist Henry Sumner Maine’s account of succession in Ancient Law (1861), which rests on an analogy between the family and the corporation. With their tropes of transmitted guilt, these discussions point to anxieties arising from the law’s construction of inherited identity as simultaneously individual and intergenerational, a paradox that both refracts and challenges nineteenth-century liberal contractual notions of identity. Armadale explores these issues through its depiction of the testator-heir dynamic as indeterminately singular and double, its association of inheritance with speculative ventures and impersonation, and its vacillation between affirming and limiting intergenerational liability. But it also fosters an alternative, mediating form of responsibility, which I call vicarious liability: a substitutive, imaginative liability both prompted and reinforced by the novel’s competing narrative perspectives and shifting or ambiguous focalization, as well as its embedded letters, diaries, and the depiction of reading as a path to identification with another’s guilt. Armadale’s take on inheritance may thus be read as a proposal for what the novel itself offers a hyper-contractual modernity: a framework for engaging in vicarious experiences of liability.

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