Judaism and Heterogeneity in the Modernist Long Novel

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-379
Author(s):  
Jeremy Tambling

This paper explores how Judaism is represented in non-Jewish writers of the nineteenth-century (outstandingly, Walter Scott and George Eliot) and in modernist long novels, such as those by Dorothy Richardson, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Alfred Döblin, Robert Musil, and Thomas Mann, and, in the Latin American novel, Carlos Fuentes and Roberto Bolaño. It finds a relationship between the length of the ‘long’ novel, as a meaningful category in itself (not to be absorbed into other modernist narratives), and the interest that these novels have in Judaism, and in anti-semitism (e.g. in the Dreyfus affair) as something which cannot be easily assimilated into the narratives which the writers mentioned are interested in. The paper investigates the implications of this claim for reading these texts.

Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence

This chapter turns from a historical account of the development of the US literature of experience and the Latin American literature of reading to a textual analysis of the US and Latin American historical novel. Hemispheric/inter-American scholars often cite William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) as exemplifying instances of literary borrowing across the North–South divide. As I demonstrate, however, each of the later texts also realigns its predecessor’s historical imaginary according to the dominant logics of the US and Latin American literary fields. Whereas the American works foreground experiential models of reconstructing the past and conveying knowledge across generations, García Márquez’s Latin American novel presents reading as the fundamental mode of comprehending and transmitting history.


Slavic Review ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 615-629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Rogger

The Beilis case—a charge of ritual murder brought against an obscure Jewish clerk in July 1911 and tried before a Kiev jury in September 1913— has more than once been called Russia's Dreyfus Affair. As a shorthand summary, the comparison serves well enough. In both instances an innocent nonentity was plucked out of obscurity to become the object of a contest whose larger implications, while they agitated politics and opinion, escaped the victim or left him indifferent. Beyond this, points of difference loom larger than those of similarity.


2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 321-332
Author(s):  
ROBERT IRWIN

AbstractThe poet, traveller, Arabist and campaigning anti-imperialist Wilfrid Blunt, who visited Gobineau in 1871, described him in his diary as follows: “Gobineau is a man of about 55, with grey hair and moustache, dark rather prominent eyes, sallow complexion, and tall figure with brisk almost jerky gait. In temperament he is nervous, energetic in manner, observant, but distrait, passing rapidly from thought to thought, a good talker but a bad listener. He is a savant, novelist, poet, sculptor, archaeologist, a man of taste, a man of the world”.1On December 16 1904, Marcel Proust wrote to an old friend from schooldays, “Me voici gobinien. Je ne pense qu’à lui”.2That old friend was Robert Dreyfus, the brother of the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus, and, together with Proust, one of the leading campaigners for Alfred's release from Devil's Island. (Alfred was only fully exonerated in 1906.) Proust, of course, skilfully worked the scandals and passions of the Dreyfus Affair into his great sequence of novels,À la recherche du temps perdu. As for Robert, he was to publish his Souvenirs sur Marcel Proust in 1926. But he had also published an admiring monograph entitledLa vie et prophéties du Comte de Gobineauin 1909. All this may suggest that, though Count Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau (1816-82) was a racist, he may not have been a conventional one.


PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (3) ◽  
pp. 698-701
Author(s):  
Anadeli Bencomo

Carlos Fuentes, like many other writers of the Boom, discussed his peers' unprecedented renovation of Latin American narrative forms—specifically, the novel (e.g., Donoso; Vargas Llosa). In La nueva novela hispanoamericana (1969; “The New Spanish American Novel”), Fuentes reviews the most influential novels of the 1960s after presenting some of the founders of the literary modernity that preceded the Boom: Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, Miguel Angel Asturias, and Alejo Carpentier. Fuentes focuses on the Boom's protagonists—Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, and Julio Cortázar—to highlight his ideas about the groundbreaking contributions of these novels.


PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (3) ◽  
pp. 723-726
Author(s):  
Maarten Van Delden

The United States looms large in the Latin American literary imagination. From Domingo Sarmiento and José Martí in the nineteenth century to Octavio Paz and Alberto Fuguet in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, many Latin American writers have depicted the United States in their writings and pondered the cultural and historical significance of their powerful neighbor to the north. But perhaps no Latin American writer has had as close—and complicated—a relationship with the United States as Carlos Fuentes. Fuentes was a fierce critic of American culture and United States foreign policy; at the same time, there was much that he admired about the United States, and it was clear that he was eager to have his voice heard here.


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