scholarly journals How Jewish Refugee Critics Changed British Literary Criticism, 1970–2020

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 80
Author(s):  
David Herman

During the mid- and late 20th century, a small group of Jewish refugee critics changed the way British culture thought about what kind of literature mattered and why. These outsiders went on to have an enormous impact on late 20th-century British literary culture. What was this impact? Why in the last third of the 20th century? Why did British literary culture become so much more receptive to critics like George Steiner, Gabriel Josipovici, Martin Esslin and SS Prawer and to a new canon of continental Jewish writers? The obstacles to Jewish refugee critics were formidable. Yet their work on writers like Kafka, Brecht and Paul Celan, and thinkers like Heidegger and Lukacs had a huge impact. They also broke the post-war silence about the Holocaust and moved the Jewish Bibl from the margins of English-speaking culture.

Author(s):  
Tegwyn Hughes

This paper will investigate girls’ comics in late 20th century Britain to illuminate the experiences of the adolescent post-war generation. My research focuses on girls’ comics, specifically Bunty, Mandy, and Judy, which were read widely throughout the country. The illustrated stories in these publications typically portrayed teenage girls as the protagonists in a variety of situations and adventures. By using the primary source documents of the comics as the main basis for my research, I explore the following questions: to what extent did the comics reflect the changing assumptions about gender and gender expectations in British society from the 1950s to 1970s? Did girls feel empowered by the stories they read, or did they feel like they had to conform to a certain ideal of womanhood produced by gender norms? How were these ideals configured by race, especially by Caribbean migration in post-war Britain? By examining this small portion of British popular culture and its reception, I will gain a wider understanding of fluid and dynamic ideas about gender in these crucial decades of the late 20th century.  


Author(s):  
Saul Noam Zaritt

Irving Howe was an American literary and social critic. Howe was a central figure in the circles of American democratic socialism as well as a prominent voice in post-war American literary criticism. Though he addressed a great number of literary topics and periods in his writing, Howe wrote important reflections on international literary modernism—in what Howe perceived as its last stages. Howe helped facilitate the rise of modernism in the cultural mainstream during the post-war period while remaining critical of the ways in which contemporary ideologies could appropriate the strategies of the literary avant-garde for exploitative and destructive purposes. Howe was particularly active in promoting modern Yiddish literature, initiating the translation and circulation of Yiddish writers who had previously been unknown to English-speaking audiences. Seeking to conserve a disappearing culture, Howe viewed Yiddish modernism as a compelling expression of the tension in modernity between tradition and cultural innovation.


Author(s):  
Robert T. Tally, Jr.

Fredric Jameson (b. 1934) was the leading Marxist literary and cultural critic in the United States and, arguably, in the English-speaking world in the late 20th century and remains so in the early 21st. In a career that spans more than 60 years, Jameson has produced some 25 books and hundreds of essays in which he has demonstrated the versatility and power of Marxist criticism in analyzing and evaluating an enormous range of cultural phenomena, from literary texts to architecture, art history, cinema, economic formations, psychology, social theory, urban studies, and utopianism, to mention but a few. In his early work, Jameson introduced a number of important 20th-century European Marxist theorists to American audiences, beginning with his study of Jean-Paul Sartre’s style and continuing with his Marxism and Form (1971) and The Prison-House of Language (1972), which offered critical analyses of such theorists as Georg Lukacs, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse, along with the Frankfurt School, Russian formalism, and French structuralism. With The Political Unconscious (1981) and other works, Jameson deftly articulated such topics as the linguistic turn in literature and philosophy, the concepts of desire and national allegory, and the problems of interpretation and transcoding in a decade when continental theory was beginning to transform literary studies in the English-speaking world. Jameson then became the leading theorist and critic of postmodernism, and his Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) demonstrated the power of Marxist theoretical practice to make sense of the system underlying the discrete and seemingly unrelated phenomena in the arts, architecture, media, economics, and so on. Jameson’s concept of cognitive mapping has been especially influential on cultural theories of postmodernity and globalization. Jameson’s lifelong commitment to utopian thought and dialectical criticism have found more systematic expression in such books as Archaeologies of the Future (2005) and Valences of the Dialectic (2009), and he has continued to develop a major, six-volume project titled “The Poetics of Social Forms” (the final two volumes of which remain forthcoming as of 2018), whose trajectory ultimately covers myth, allegory, romance, realism, modernism, postmodernism, and beyond. Jameson’s expansive, eclectic, and ultimately holistic approach to cultural critique demonstrates the power of Marxist critical theory both to interpret, and to help change, the world.


Author(s):  
Patrick Glauthier

In the context of Latin literature, inconsistency is most often invoked to mean self-contradiction: for example, in the second Georgic, Virgil declares that Italy is blissfully free from snakes, but in the following book, snakes pose a deadly threat to the Italian farmer and his animals. Inconsistency, however, can also describe general ambiguity, lack of unity, factual inaccuracy, and incoherence of almost any kind. A number of historically contingent factors affect how readers recognize and respond to inconsistencies. Ancient criticism of the Homeric poems and the Aeneid often considered inconsistencies flaws, and this tradition has influenced modern thinking about the topic. From the late 20th century onwards, critics have frequently viewed the creation of inconsistency as a deliberate authorial strategy: the reader is exposed to two different realities, and the resulting tension contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole. The apparent receptivity of Roman literary culture to inconsistency may imply a worldview that had more in common with quantum mechanics than an Aristotelian universe dominated by the law of non-contradiction.


Author(s):  
Antony Moulis

Abstract: While there is an abundance of commentary and criticism on Le Corbusier’s effect upon architecture and planning globally – in Europe, Northern Africa, the Americas and the Indian sub-continent – there is very little dealing with other contexts such as Australia. The paper will offer a first appraisal of Le Corbusier’s relationship with Australia, providing example of the significant international reach of his ideas to places he was never to set foot. It draws attention to Le Corbusier's contacts with architects who practiced in Australia and little known instances of his connections - his drawing of the City of Adelaide plan (1950) and his commission for art at Jorn Utzon's Sydney Opera House (1958). The paper also considers the ways that Le Corbusier’s work underwent translation into Australian architecture and urbanism in the mid to late 20th century through the influence his work exerted on others, identifying further possibilities for research on the topic.  Keywords: Le Corbusier; post-war architecture; international modernism; Australian architecture, 20th century architecture. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/LC2015.2015.752 


Author(s):  
Elvira Vatazhko

Undoubtedly, the second half of the 20th century and the early 21st century are notable for the extensive artistic experiment, including metatextual and metafictional phenomena. Such scholars as Gérard Genette, Anna Wierzbicka, Patricia Waugh, Linda Hutcheon, Robert Sholes, and many others focused on the mentioned issues in their research work. Therefore, this paper considers metatextuality and metafiction in the theoretical perspective tracing the origins of metatextuality and its connections with postmodern literature. The terms ‘metatext’ and ‘metafiction’ appeared as rather close in time. Notably, both of them are based on the discursive practices of the late 20th century. However, the term ‘metatext’ originated in the scholarly practice of structuralism. It is obvious that ‘metatext’ was constructed by analogy with the concept of ‘metalanguage’. Either of them does not exist without the initial text (or language). Metatextual elements are important for analyzing styles, genres, types of expression, discursive functions, and more. On the other hand, the term ‘metafiction’ has an obvious connection with genre studies. Metafiction qualifies as a special kind of literary text that became characteristic of the postmodern era. Such features as self-referentiality of artistic expression, introspection, and self-consciousness became essential for postmodern aesthetics. Metatextuality relates to the narrative theory and metacritiсism, while metafictionality is applicable within the intertextual analysis. Thus, the paper highlights an advance of metadiscourse in the cultural consciousness of the late 20th century.


2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (33) ◽  
pp. 31-40
Author(s):  
Ingrida Kisieliūtė

At the end of the 20th century, the study of literature was supplemented by such new methods as biopoetics, geopoetics, new historicism, etc. The New Economic Criticism, a new approach to the literary text, was found in the United States in the late 20th century. The present article discusses the main aspects of the aforementioned area of the study of literature and as well presents the possible approaches to literary texts from the economic perspective. The New Economic Criticism does not aim to become a method or tendency; thus, it givesthe freedom for a researcher to choose the perspective on the relationship between the literature and economics. The above-mentioned kind of analysis may be found in the English-speaking countries; whereas, the Russian literature has still remained unconsidered; however, Russian scholars are attempting to look at their fiction through the eyes of an economist. In Lithuania, the kind of research has not been found yet. Therefore, the article suggests one of the possible economic approaches, i.e., the analysis of the financial practices of the protagonist of The Gambler by F. Dostoyevsky. 


Author(s):  
Maroula Joannou

Mary Joannou examines the place of London as a haven for English-speaking exiles and émigrés and questions the extent to which it is possible to separate English literature from the literature of the rest of the world as post-war globalization destabilized, de-territorialized and de-colonized Englishness. For the five migrant women writers addressed here - Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Rumer Godden, Attia Hosain, Doris Lessing, and Kamala Markandaya – the attractions of migration to London, albeit bomb-damaged and shortage riven after the war, far outweighed the drabness of the environment of the metropolis. The new migrants, all politically on the left and strong upholders of freedom of speech and universal human rights, made a significant contribution to the enrichment and expansion of Britain’s literary culture in the 1940s and 1950s which was well-served by thriving post-war publishing and media industries.


2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 54
Author(s):  
Vaidehi Subramani

The second decade of this century has often hailed as the decade of aspirations, ambitions and development, yet relinquished the phenomenon of inclusion at the back benches of the develop - mental discourses. Disabled persons constitute fifteen percent of world population. The stigmatizing terminology 'mental retarda - tion' was in use world over till late 20th century. This term has been gradually replaced by 'intellectual disability' in most of English speaking countries very recently.


2021 ◽  
pp. 409-434
Author(s):  
David Fuller

AbstractThis essay examines the ways in which the American poet Charles Olson, and the German-speaking Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan, each in relation to specific post-war cultural circumstances, experimented with new ways of structuring poetry in relation to the breath: Olson in response to new global scientific, political, and intellectual currents; Celan in response to the Holocaust. The essay discusses not only how the poets wrote but also how they realised the printed forms of their poetry in performance, contrasting Olson’s literal performance of his theories with the different relation of print to performance of his contemporary and associate William Carlos Williams. It argues that Olson’s experiments, polemically formulated in his manifesto Projective Verse, while they have influenced central currents of American poetry since the 1950s, have remained largely American, whereas Celan’s, tentatively intimated in his anti-manifesto Der Meridian, and inimitably personal in their specific forms, can also be seen as modelling ways in which a wide range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry can be realised in reading aloud.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document