Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification
1st Edition
Published on 1. November 2013
272 pages
978-0-8232-5508-5 (ISBN)
Description
Why were modernist works of art, literature, and music that were neither by nor about Jews nevertheless interpreted as Jewish? In this book, Neil Levi explores how the antisemitic fantasy of a mobile, dangerous, contagious Jewish spirit unfolds in the antimodernist polemics of Richard Wagner, Max Nordau, Wyndham Lewis, and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, reaching its apotheosis in the notorious 1937 Nazi exhibition "Degenerate Art." Levi then turns to James Joyce, Theodor W. Adorno, and Samuel Beckett, offering radical new interpretations of these modernist authors to show how each presents his own poetics as a self-conscious departure from the modern antisemitic imaginary.
Levi claims that, just as antisemites once feared their own contamination by a mobile, polluting Jewish spirit, so too much of postwar thought remains governed by the fear that it might be contaminated by the spirit of antisemitism. Thus he argues for the need to confront and work through our own fantasies and projections-not only about the figure of the Jew but also about that of the antisemite.
Levi claims that, just as antisemites once feared their own contamination by a mobile, polluting Jewish spirit, so too much of postwar thought remains governed by the fear that it might be contaminated by the spirit of antisemitism. Thus he argues for the need to confront and work through our own fantasies and projections-not only about the figure of the Jew but also about that of the antisemite.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
NY
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Edition type
Digital original
File size
3,25 MB
ISBN-13
978-0-8232-5508-5 (9780823255085)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
11/2013
Fordham University Press
€66.00
Shipment within 10-20 days
Person
Neil Levi is Associate Professor of English at Drew University.
