Zwischen Inspiration und Imitation

Die künstlerische Haltung und Kompositionstechnik des finnischen Komponisten Aarre Merikanto wird anhand von Dokumenten zur Arbeitsweise der Reger-Klasse in Leipzig, Merikantos und Regers Kompositionen und Briefen analysiert. Im Mittelpunkt der Untersuchung steht der Vergleich zwischen Regers <Streichsextett> (1911) und Merikantos <Konzert für Geige, Klarinette, Horn und Streichsextett> für ein Preisausschreiben des Schott-Verlags (1924). Auf die von Harold Bloom und Joseph N. Straus angeregte theoretische Diskussion wird hingewiesen. (Autor)

The human concept in Russian Neomodernist prose of the 21st Century

Research subject is grounding efficiency and topicality of Russian literature (and its studies) as a cultural project, that could be apologia of a traditional individual. Methodological basis is anthropocentric literature of Erich Auerbach, Dmitry Likhachev, Sergey Averintsev, Harold Bloom, in which literary text analysis, assessment of genre structures lead to the conclusions on the individual’s state under the established cultural tradition. Analysis of contemporary Russian novels outlines authors’ worlds. Reading them evokes various images: of a passionate individual, often with certain intent, but always affected by the interaction with crises and voids (Yury Buida), an individual characterized by various anti-totalitarian acts, by aspiration to exercise the freedom of thought in everyday life (Ludmila Ulitskaya), an egocentric individual, believing that the most significant victories come in the representation of the own self (Edward Limonov), an individual prone to interaction with totalitarian principles, synthesizing non-canonic metaphysical forms and attributes of strong state under ambivalent relations of utopia and anti-utopia (Vladimir Sorokin), an individual actively exploring modern world and general existence in motions, related by the author to Oriental cognition principles and spiritual practices (Victor Pelevin). Our focused literary analysis aims at combining all text moves in plot and language that represent evolvement of a person as one of the central problems of any novel.

A Judaism of Ethics in a Post-Holocaust World: The Interplay of Literature and Theology in Cynthia Ozick's Messiah of Stockholm

This article suggests that bringing Jewish literature and Jewish thought into conversation can deepen our understanding of each. As an illustration of this interdisciplinary methodology, I offer a reading of Cynthia Ozick's 1987 Messiah of Stockholm. I claim that Ozick has embedded an argument about the relationship of post-Holocaust Jewry to the past into the literary features of her novel. Her argument draws in particular upon Leo Baeck's account of Judaism as focused on the present and future in contrast to the worshipful approach to the past characteristic of other religions. At the same time, I offer a more nuanced take on the fear of idolatry so often noted in analyses of Ozick's work and situate that fear in relationship to the literary theories of her predecessor Bruno Schulz, who plays a key role in the novel, and her contemporary Harold Bloom.

8. The critic’s “I”

“The critic’s “I”” argues that Jewish literature is not only what writers and readers do, but also the degree to which critics are constantly contextualizing it. Cultural thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Irving Howe, and Alfred Kazin, through a discerning “I” and a penetrating eye, allow literature to speak to society and vice versa. There is an important role for public intellectuals who have a connections with, or away from, institutions of higher learning. It is worth looking at the cases of Susan Sontag and Harold Bloom. Without criticism, literature is incapable of lasting meaning. In the case of Jewish literature, critics become torchbearers of transnational ideas.

The Inverted Initiation Rituals in Shakespeare with a Special Emphasis on Hamlet

The article deals the possibility of applying Vladimir Propp’s, basically anthropological idea of “the inverted ritual” to the interpretation of certain plays by William Shakespeare, particularly Hamlet. The said inversion concerns three rituals: the sacrificial ritual, where the passive and obedient victim suddenly rebels, or at least becomes difficult to control (which is the case, for example, of Ophelia in Hamlet); of the initiatory ritual, where the apparently benevolent master of the characters initiation is shown as a monster (which can be exemplified by Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle); and of the matrimonial ritual, where the theoretically loving husband (more rarely wife), or lover, is revealed as a highly malicious and unpredictable creature, an example of which can be Hamlet himself. The article makes use of the work of such critics as G.K. Wilson, Harold Bloom, Vladimir Propp, René Girard, and Mircea Eliade.

The Evils of Supersessionism

In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom writes that “strong poets make . . . [poetic] history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves.” I apply Bloom’s literary theory, mutatis mutandis, to religious history and theology. Even the other monotheistic Abrahamic faiths—Christianity and Islam—resent their dependency on Hebrew Scripture and tradition and aim to make room for themselves by misreading the Jews and Judaism. Christians would define themselves by writing a “New Testament” that supplants the “Old,” even as Muslims would produce a “Final Testament” that supersedes all previous. Bloom describes “six revisionary ratios” by which strong poets would distinguish themselves from their predecessors. My task is to adapt these conventions and to demonstrate that they have more than aesthetic/literary import. Christian and Islamic ethics and theology, and even Nazism as a pagan counter, can plausibly be seen to suffer from the anxiety of influence and to seek to liberate themselves from their Jewish paternity by literal and figurative patricide.

(De)Facing Time

The title of John Ashbery’s 1965 poem “Clepsydra” alludes to Charles Baudelaire’s “L’Horloge,” from Les Fleurs du mal, and reading Ashbery’s poem as a response to “L’Horloge” helps refine our understanding of his place in literary history, a process this essay pursues by considering “Clepsydra” in relation to influential readings of poetry offered by some of Ashbery’s major contemporaries (Marjorie Perloff, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom). Exemplifying the allegorical mode of modernism that the young Ashbery resists, Baudelaire’s poem manifests the triumph of linear time; “Clepsydra” imagines time as circular flow, averting allegorical time chiefly by means of prosopopoeia and metalepsis. The most old-fashioned of allegorical devices, prosopopoeia abounds in “Clepsydra,” but Ashbery repeatedly endeavors to counteract it, and metalepsis by its nature resists linearity. Despite the poem’s astonishing inventiveness, however, in the poem the resilience of allegory and of linear time is ultimately reaffirmed.

Daemonic

The term daemonic—often substantivized in German as the daemonic (das Dämonische) since its use by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the early 19th century—is a literary topos associated with divine inspiration and the idea of genius, with the nexus between character and fate and, in more orthodox Christian manifestations, with moral transgression and evil. Although strictly modern literary uses of the term have become prominent only since Goethe, its origins lie in the classical idea of the δαíμων, transliterated into English as daimon or daemon, as an intermediary between the earthly and the divine. This notion can be found in pre-Socratic thinkers such as Empedocles and Heraclitus, in Plato, and in various Stoic and Neo-Platonic sources. One influential aspect of Plato’s presentation of the daemonic is found in Socrates’s daimonion: a divine sign, voice, or hint that dissuades Socrates from taking certain actions at crucial moments in his life. Another is the notion that every soul contains an element of divinity—known as its daimon—that leads it toward heavenly truth. Already in Roman thought, this idea of an external voice or sign begins to be associated with an internal genius that belongs to the individual. In Christian thinking of the European romantic period, the daemonic in general and the Socratic daimonion in particular are associated with notions such as non-rational divine inspiration (for example, in Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder) and with divine providence (for example, in Joseph Priestley). At the same time, the daemonic is also often interpreted as evil or Satanic—that is: as demonic—by European authors writing in a Christian context. In Russia in particular, during a period spanning from the mid-19th century until the early 20th century, there is a rich vein of novels, including works by Gogol and Dostoevsky, that deal with this more strictly Christian sense of the demonic, especially the notion that the author/narrator may be a heretical figure who supplants the primacy of God’s creation. But the main focus of this article is the more richly ambivalent notion of the daemonic, which explicitly combines both the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian heritages of the term. This topos is most prominently mobilized by two literary exponents during the 19th century: Goethe, especially in his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth), and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his Notebooks and in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Both Goethe’s and Coleridge’s treatments of the term, alongside its classical and Judeo-Christian heritages, exerted an influence upon literary theory of the 20th century, leading important theorists such as Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Hans Blumenberg, Angus Fletcher, and Harold Bloom to associate the daemonic with questions concerning the novel, myth, irony, allegory, and literary influence.