scholarly journals Language, Representation and Fetish. Hunger in “The Shawl” by Cynthia Ozick

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (45) ◽  
pp. 98-110
Author(s):  
Bartosz Sowiński

Streszczenie: The Shawl Cynthii Ozick stanowi niezwykle interesującą próbę zapisu doznania głodu, utraty i Holokaustu. Opowieść ta przekształca się w medytację nad możliwością przedstawienia doznań traumatycznych, nie poddających się łatwej symbolizacji. Umieszczając język i literaturę, czy też szerzej reprezentację, w stanie podejrzenia, Ozick pozostaje wierna tradycji żydowskiego anikonizmu. Autorka czyni to jednak w sposób ostentacyjnie literacki, zatrącający o idolatrię fikcji powieściowej. Odrzucając przedstawienia werystyczne lub hiperrealistyczne głodu i Holokaustu, Ozick podpowiada, że iluzja bezpośredniości, którą takie teksty wytwarzają, jest li tylko fetyszem, nie zaś śladem obecności ciała w literaturze. Ambicje Ozick są być może skromniejsze, ale z pewnością uczciwsze. Autorka odsłania nieprzystawalność porządku zmysłów i literatury, jednak – trawestując tytuł książki Georgesa Didi-Hubermana – wydaje się również mówić „literatura mimo wszystko”, afirmując tym samym medium języka oraz literaturę pomimo wszystkich jej niedoskonałości. Summary: The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick is an extremely intriguing attempt at writing hunger, loss and the Holocaust. The novella transforms into a meditation on the possibility of depicting traumatic sensations, which easily defy symbolisation. As she casts suspicion on language and literature, and more broadly representation, Ozick adheres to the tradition of Jewish aniconism. However, she does so in an ostentatiously literary manner, verging on the idolatry of fiction. Ozick discards verisimilitude and hyperrealism in the representations of hunger and the Holocaust. In so doing, she seems to suggest that the illusion of immediacy they produce is merely a fetish rather than the literary celebration of the body. Ozick’s ambitions may be more moderate but they are certainly more honest: she explores the irreconcilable differences between the realms of the sensual and the literary. However, she also seems to say “literature in spite of all” (to misquote Georges Didi-Huberman’s dictum), thereby articulating her affirmation of the linguistic medium and literature in spite of all their shortcomings and deficiencies.

Prospects ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 387-404
Author(s):  
Emily Miller Budick

InPlaying in the Dark, Toni Morrison sets out to chart a new “geography” in literary criticism, to provide a “map” for locating what she calls the “Africanist” presence in the American literary tradition. The assumption of Americanist critics, she argues, has been that “traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the fourhundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then, African Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence — which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture — has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture's literature.” For Morrison, recording the Africanist presence produces nothing less than an absolute revision of our notion of what constitutes the American literary tradition.


2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 6-14
Author(s):  
Gaweł Janik
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  

The article is an attempt to critically read the Polish comic book "Episodes from Auschwitz: The Carriers of a Mystery" by Michał Gałek and Michał Pyteraf. The author draws attention to the risks associated with the choice of the comic as a medium talking about the trauma of the Holocaust. Placing a comic book within publications that fit the current of historical politics, the author of the article pointed to the elements that testify to his polonocentrism. The image of the body was analyzed, with particular emphasis on differences in the presentation of prisoners of the camp, men selected to work in the Sonderkommando branches and its members. Attention was paid to the fetishization and eroticization of the Jewish body, which is dangerously close to the Nazi body.


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 95-116
Author(s):  
Menachem Feuer

The constellation of pain, resentment, the body, and time – as they exist in the wake of the Enlightenment and in the dawn of a new barbarism - is found throughout the work of Jean Améry and Peter Sloterdijk. Both thinkers were especially influenced by Nietzsche’s readings of resentment, his challenge to the Enlightenment, and his turn to the body as the basis of a new kind of thinking which starts with pain, dwells in irreversible time, and ends with the possibility of action and joy. While this new thinking is novel and appeals to all humankind, the most unexpected points of convergence between Améry and Sloterdijk can be found in their particular neo-Nietzschean articulations of Jewishness: using what Harold Bloom would call revision, they both propose a revision of Nietzsche’s reading of Judaism as resentment. Améry associates Jewishness with “revolt” while Sloterdijk associates what he calls “kynicism” (as opposed to cynicism) with Jewishness.1 Intensely aware of the mortal blows that have been dealt to the Enlightenment, philosophy, and modernity as well as to the human body during the Holocaust, Améry and Sloterdijk both address – either directly or indirectly – the meaning of cynicism in relation to Jewishness, in particular, and the modern condition, in general. 


Genealogy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 88
Author(s):  
David Dickson

This article discusses the apparent desire in Anglo-American Holocaust fiction to form a deeper connection to the horror of the Holocaust by recreating scenes of suffering in the gas chamber. Using Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, Alison Landsberg’s theory of ‘prosthetic memory’ and the concept of ‘feeling-with’ as outlined by Sonia Kruks, it discusses the motives underlying these representations and what an audience stands to learn from these bodily encounters with the Holocaust past. The article begins by discussing texts that explore the notions of temporal and emotional distance and the unreachability of the Holocaust dead, while also reflecting the corresponding impulse to reconnect with the murdered by physicalising them as bodies in pain. It then moves on to works that aim to make the experience of death in the gas chamber literally inhabitable for present-day nonwitnesses. In pursuing this argument, the article focuses on six representative texts: Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), Bryan Singer’s Apt Pupil (1998), Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone (2001), The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006 and 2008, for the book and film respectively), In Paradise (2014) by Peter Matthiessen and Mick Jackson’s Denial (2016).


AJS Review ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-230
Author(s):  
Naomi Sokoloff

This is an exciting time for North American Jewish literature. In the past ten years, there has been an explosion of writing by new and established authors. In the field of fiction alone, the shelves have filled with titles by such fine talent as Pearl Abraham, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander, Myla Goldberg, Ehud Havatzelet, Dara Horn, Jonathan Safran Foer, Joan Leegant, Tova Mirvis, Jon Papernick, Jonathan Rosen, Aryeh Lev Stollman, and many others, as well as new works by veteran writers such as Allegra Goodman, Thane Rosenbaum, and Steve Stern. Add to these names the preeminent Cynthia Ozick, and don’t forget Philip Roth, whose productivity continues unabated and whose latest novels include some of his strongest work ever. A variety of striking themes has come to the fore in this new wave of literary creativity. Notable trends include an unprecedented attention to religion (especially Orthodox Jewish life); a fascination with women’s lives and with questions of gender and sexual orientation; a concern with the experiences of the second and succeeding generations of the Holocaust; a nostalgia for and rediscovery of the old country; a consideration of new Americans in the 1980s and 1990s; and a rethinking of what it means to be a Jew in Israel and in the Diaspora.


Author(s):  
Abdul Rahman

ABSTRACTIndonesia has an education figure that greatness is not inferior to other world education figures i.e. Ki Hajar Dewantara. He explained that education is an effort in increasing the growth of manners (inner strength, character, mind, and intellectualism) from the body of the students, so the live of the students suit their world. Learning is defined by Knowles as a way of organizing learners to achieve the goal. Manners operationally is a positive behavior that is done through the custom that is formed into a person's character/learners. Based on these two definitions appears that education, learning, character/characters is a unity that cannot be separated with each other. Positive behaviors that must be drilled to learners consists of many aspects and one of them is how to speak. Thus, training the speech containing positive behavior is mandatory for language teacher (Indonesian Language). Any language skills cannot be trained separately between one's skills with other language skills. As a professional teacher, arranging strategies for Indonesian language teacher which are always associated with character education will no longer be a burden. Literature is a picture of human life. Literature becomes right media in imparting a positive character for learners. Through the Indonesia language teacher professionalism will form a younger generation who have lofty manners or strong character. Keywords: learning, language and literature, characters.


2016 ◽  
Vol 55 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamás Valastyán

The configuration of faith and desperation constitutes a pattern in modernity that appears in different ethical, epistemic and aestethic contexts. I think that this pattern is outlined in the poetry and essays of Szilárd Borbély and what is more, it has essential power. We may say that the existence after the holocaust can be measured by its own relations in contrast to genocide. Existence is already a relation to genocide. In my essay I present the attempts of Borbély Szilárd to show that horrible measurement. Or more exactly: I cannot explore the characters of his deep, colourful laminated, and sometimes controversial answers; I just focus on three points: At first I present the dilemmas of dealing with the poetic life-work of Miklós Radnóti; then I discuss the polemic relation to the holocaust interpretation of Kertész Imre; and finally I try to approach the poems in A Testhez [To the Body] which derive their truth from the memory of holocaust survivors.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document