scholarly journals ‘Why will you Jews not accept our culture, our religion and our language?’: James Joyce’s Jew through the Eyes of Jewish America

2014 ◽  
pp. 119-122
Author(s):  
Dan O’Brien
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Philip Roth ◽  
Saul Bellow ◽  
Bernard Malamud ◽  
Sense Of Identity

Just as James Joyce is the most important writer since Shakespeare, his Jewish-Irish character, Ulysses’ Leopold Bloom, is the most fascinating fictional Jew since Shylock. All authors must struggle with Joyce’s overwhelming legacy, but what of writers who are themselves Jewish? How do they envisage Bloom and relate to his complex sense of identity—as a Jew, as an Irishman, but most fundamentally as a human being? The three greatest Jewish American writers of the twentieth century, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow, were all deeply influenced by Joyce. Each of them responded to Joyce’s masterpiece by rewriting it from the perspective of an American Jew—just as Ulysses itself is an Irish rewriting of Homer’s Odyssey. What draws these authors to Joyce? Is it their shared heritage of exile and a lost homeland, or Joyce’s powerful use of language? When asked how one can tell if a novel is Jewish ...

Versions of Immobility: The Contemporary American Writer and the Jewish Tradition

1966 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 78-98
Author(s):  
Jonathan Raban
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Philip Roth ◽  
Saul Bellow ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Bernard Malamud ◽  
Jewish Experience ◽  
Urban Problems

The “Jewishness” of recent American fiction has already been well explored. But discussion of the work of Jewish writers tends to be retrospective: it leads back to the shtetl and the shlemiel without considering how “Americanised” Jewish forms and themes have become. Clearly, recent authors such as Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow are indebted to a fund of “Jewish experience”. But their novels are “American”, far more concerned with twentieth-century urban problems than with the enclosed life of the traditional Jewish community. This essay therefore attempts to assess how far “Jewish” localised material has been translated into specifically “American” terms.

‘Webbed with Golden Lines’: Saul Bellow's Romanticism

Romanticism ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-67
Author(s):  
Mark Sandy
Keyword(s):  
Culturally Diverse ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
British Romanticism ◽  
Saul Bellow ◽  
American School ◽  
Dominant Design ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Web

Attaining prominence in the post-war era, Saul Bellow is one of the most widely read and intellectually eclectic novelists of the Jewish American School.1 Bellow's frequent references to Romanticism form a dominant design within his culturally diverse fiction.2 Taken from Bellow's Herzog, my title indicates the two levels on which Bellow's Romantic allusions operate. At one level, this ‘webbed’ pattern of ‘golden lines’ suggests how Bellow interlaces his own prose with the poetry and philosophy of British Romanticism to govern readers' responses to his portrayal of epiphanies. On another, Herzog's moment of inter-connected vision signals Bellow's investment in a Coleridgean and Wordsworthian imagination that reveals the all-pervasive spirit of the ‘[o]ne Life within us and abroad’3. This metaphysical dimension to Bellow's web of ‘golden lines’ finds a further affinity with Shelley's later notion of the ‘web of being’.4

The Ancient Prehistory of Modern Adults

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheila Murnaghan ◽  
Deborah H. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Hilda Doolittle ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter considers some of the ways in which the association between childhood and antiquity has been conceptualized and elaborated in works for adults, particularly in the early decades of the twentieth century. Memories of formative encounters by the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann and the poet and novelist H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) set the stage for a discussion of Freudian psychoanalysis, the scholarly theories of Jane Harrison, and the works of James Joyce, H.D., Mary Butts, Naomi Mitchison, and Virginia Woolf. The practice of archaeology and the knowledge of Greek emerge as key elements in distinctly gendered visions of the relationship between modern lives and the classical past.

Modernist Dante

2021 ◽  
pp. 633-650
Author(s):  
Daniela Caselli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
First Century ◽  
Djuna Barnes ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

This chapter traces a history of Dante’s reception in anglophone literature between the 1870s and the 1950s. It acknowledges his importance in Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, but engages more closely with Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf. It shows that the modernist Dante that emerges from these authors’ work is both a formal and political one: recruited as an anti-authoritarian voice from the past and seen anew from feminist and queer perspectives, this is not a twenty-first century Dante forced against his will to virtue-signal, however; on the contrary, this is a Dante anachronistically familiar with key ‘vices’ of twentieth-century authors, readers and commentators. Focusing on sullenness, resistance, and fatigue, the chapter argues for a new understanding of modernist experiments with Dante’s political and formal complexity that refuse to use him as a ‘code or a weapon […] to crush someone’, as Dorothy Richardson put it.

scholarly journals The Linguistic Philosophy of Noam Chomsky

2014 ◽  
pp. 103-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Binoy Barman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Generative Grammar ◽  
Philosophical Investigation ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Noam Chomsky ◽  
Human Child ◽  
Mental Exercise ◽  
Linguistic Philosophy

Noam Chomsky, one of the most famous linguists of the twentieth century, based his linguistic works on certain philosophical doctrines. His main contribution to linguistics is Transformational Generative Grammar, which is founded on mentalist philosophy. He opposes the behaviourist psychology in favour of innatism for explaining the acquisition of language. He claims that it becomes possible for human child to learn a language for the linguistic faculty with which the child is born, and that the use of language for an adult is mostly a mental exercise. His ideas brought about a revolution in linguistics, dubbed as Chomskyan Revolution. According to him, the part of language which is innate to human being would be called Universal Grammar. His philosophy holds a strong propensity to rationalism in search of a cognitive foundation. His theory is a continuation of analytic philosophy, which puts language in the centre of philosophical investigation. He would also be identified as an essentialist. This paper considers various aspects of Chomsky’s linguistic philosophy with necessary elaborations.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/pp.v51i1-2.17681

Englishness, Empire and Nostalgia: A Heterodox Religious Community's Appeal in the Inter-War Years

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 374-392
Author(s):  
Jane Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Belief Networks ◽  
Healing Ministry ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Sense Of Identity ◽  
The Rich

This article looks at the ways in which the Panacea Society – a heterodox, millenarian group based in Bedford during the inter-war years – spread its ideas: through personal, familial and shared belief networks across the British empire; by building new modes of attracting adherents, in particular a global healing ministry; and by shipping its publications widely. It then examines how the society appealed to its (white) members in the empire in three ways: through its theology, which put Britain at the centre of the world; by presuming the necessity and existence of a ‘Greater Britain’ and the British empire, while in so many other quarters these entities were being questioned in the wake of World War I; and by a deliberately cultivated and nostalgic notion of ‘Englishness’. The Panacea Society continued and developed the idea of the British empire as providential at a time when the idea no longer held currency in most circles. The article draws on the rich resource of letters in the Panacea Society archive to contribute to an emerging area of scholarship on migrants’ experience in the early twentieth-century British empire (especially the dominions) and their sense of identity, in this case both religious and British.

Rising from the Gutter

2020 ◽  
pp. 67-92
Author(s):  
Jean Lee Cole
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Lower East Side ◽  
East Side ◽  
Jewish American Literature ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
English Speaking

This chapter shows how the early comic strip was developed and then came to influence comic fiction in the early twentieth century. As the editor of the New York Journal‘s comic supplement, Rudolph Block regularized the use of panels, repetitive storylines, and caricature, resulting in the multi-panel format that defines the comic-strip genre. Block’s role in the development of the comic strip has gone largely unrecognized; as a writer of Jewish American literature, Block has been forgotten. Using the pseudonym Bruno Lessing, Block published nearly a hundred stories between 1905 and 1920 in popular magazines. These humorous stories, full of rich dialect and accompanied by vibrant illustrations, translated the multiethnic culture of the Lower East Side for a mainstream, English-speaking audience. Block represented dialect and caricature as opportunities for negotiation and play, providing ways to display identity in multiple and shifting forms.

5. Into the mainstream

2021 ◽  
pp. 50-60
Author(s):  
Ilan Stavans
Keyword(s):  
International Literature ◽  
Anzia Yezierska ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Philip Roth ◽  
Saul Bellow ◽  
Abraham Cahan ◽  
Cynthia Ozick ◽  
Isaac Bashevis Singer ◽  
Grace Paley ◽  
Jewish Writers

“Into the mainstream” looks at immigrant Jewish writers in America, such as Abraham Cahan (The Rise of David Levinsky), Anzia Yezierska (Bread Givers), and Isaac Bashevis Singer (Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories), all of whom transitioned from Yiddish into English, and analyzes Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep as a transitional novel. We notice here the transition from “ethnic” to “national” writer in the careers of Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, and Cynthia Ozick. Much was gained and lost in Jewish literature as a result of Jews becoming a “successful minority” in America. Jewish readers have always been a voracious audience of international literature.

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