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.

Endgames

This chapter traces Rahv’s disintegrating relationship with Partisan Review and explains why he could no longer play the leadership role of “secular rabbi.” It considers the magazine’s alleged ties with the CIA. It discusses changes in Rahv’s personal life: moving to Boston, joining the faculty at Brandeis, remarrying, founding a new magazine, Modern Occasions. It relates Rahv’s story to that of Hanneh Arendt, whose publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem provoked a bitter split within Partisan Review. Arendt’s and Rahv’s attitudes toward Jewishness and Israel are discussed. It considers his animus toward Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer and enthusiasm for the New Left, which provoked a public rift with longtime associate Irving Howe. It delves into the mysterious circumstances surrounding Rahv’s death and bequest to Israel. I relate my own attitudes during the sixties to Rahv’s, notably regarding new intellectual movements and feminism.

Jewish Wheaties

Roth travels with Barbara Sproul to Asia, while maintaining his opposition to the Vietnam War; his writing turns to satire in a general effort to undermine seriousness in politics and literature Baseball, long a love of Roth’s, emerges in his lengthy burlesque novel, The Great American Novel followed by his semi-autobiographical My Life as a Man (1974), a rebuke to his first wife, Maggie. In the midst of his writing, a bitter legal encounter with Norman Mailer involving the young writer Alan Lelchuk occurs, at the same time he develops a friendship with the important Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick, who admired Roth’s rewrite of Kafka, The Breast. But he also experiences sustained criticism from Irving Howe which he never forgot. Roth unexpectedly changes publishers leaving Random House for Holt with a new editor and soon-to-be friend, Aaron Asher.

Umkämpfte Zugehörigkeit

»[W]hile one can do nothing about choosing one’s relatives, one can, as artist, choose one’s ›ancestors‹.« These words lead to the heart of a dispute between Ralph Ellison and the Dissent editor Irving Howe in the early sixties which had an impact far beyond literary criticism and scholarship. From this well documented controversy we can learn something about both the power of attributions of belonging and the art of evading them.

A política dos intelectuais nos contos de Pedro Llosa Vélez: resenha de "A medida de todas as coisas"

Objetivamos, nesta resenha, analisar como a política adentra tanto a forma como a mensagem dos contos de A medida de todas as coisas (2019), do autor peruano Pedro Llosa Vélez. Por meio de diversos recursos estruturais, as narrativas representam intelectuais inseridos em crises subjetivo-ideológicas. O tom subjetivo dos relatos elimina – ou a torna vinculado a psique dos protagonistas – a inflexão política dos contos, compondo, apesar da manifestação explícita de motivos sociais, econômicos e culturais, narrativas em que a modulação panfletária é dissipada, também, pela descoberta de si, pela ironia e pelo patético das situações figuradas. No que tange à política, baseamo-nos nas reflexões de Wolfgang Leo Maar (1982); a respeito da imbricação entre política e literatura fazemos uso dos pensamentos de Irving Howe (1987).