Legislators and Interpreters (1987), Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) and Modernity and Ambivalence (1991) are the foundational trilogy on which Zygmunt Bauman developed much of his later work ...(from postmodernity to liquid modernity and from “the Jew” to “the Stranger”). This article is a unique engagement with the trilogy and with the metaphorical thinking which relates the trilogy to Bauman's later work in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The article is divided into three parts focusing broadly on Warsaw, Leeds, and Jerusalem as contextual “windows” for Bauman's Jewishness under the sign of totalitarianism, exile, and globalism. This is the first account of Bauman's Jewishness in relation to his extraordinary life and work and includes, for the first time, his little known “Jewish” essays which are placed next to his more general theories of modernity.
The publication of Laura Marcus's Auto/biographical Discourses: Criticism, Theory, Practice (1994) coincided with a conference that I co-organised with her called 'Modernity, Culture and "the Jew"' ...(1994). We both expected the conference to be a modest event, but it turned out to be over-subscribed with many hundreds in attendance. In the light of our conference, my essay explores some of the reasons why the 1990s was thought of as an 'age of testimony' which is addressed in Auto/biographical Discourses and subsequent essays by Laura. The essay will then compare the playfulness of the autobiographical genre with the ethical seriousness of Holocaust testimonies and slave narratives. At the heart of the essay is Laura's conceptualisation of autobiography and its connections with those who write testimonial memoirs in extremis.
In recent years Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) has become a common point of reference for those within postcolonial studies—such as Paul Gilroy, Aamir Mufti, and Michael ...Rothberg—who wish to explore the historical intersections between racism, fascism, colonialism, and anti-Semitism. “Postcolonialism and the Study of Anti-Semitism” relates Arendt’s comparative thinking to other anticolonial theorists and camp survivors at the end of the Second World War—most prominently, Jean Améry, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Primo Levi, and Jean-Paul Sartre—who all made connections between the history of genocide in Europe and European colonialism. The article then compares this strand of comparative thought with postcolonial theorists of the 1970s and 1980s who, contra Arendt, divide the histories of fascism and colonialism into separate spheres. It also contrasts postcolonial theory with postcolonial literature by exploring the intertwined histories in the fiction of V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Caryl Phillips. Said’s late turn to Jewish exilic thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Erich Auerbach, and Sigmund Freud is also related to this Arendtian comparative project. The main aim of the article is to promote a more open-minded sense of historical connectedness with regard to the histories of racism, fascism, colonialism, and anti-Semitism.
Being Howard Jacobson Cheyette, Bryan
European Judaism,
09/2022, Volume:
55, Issue:
2
Journal Article, Book Review
Peer reviewed
Howard Jacobson (1942-) has been the leading Jewish writer in Britain for nearly four decades. He remains at the height of his powers with the recent publication of his memoir, Mother's Boy: A ...Writer's Beginnings (2022) which is referred to throughout this introduction. I will return to Jacobson's first novel, Coming from Behind (1983), to show how it relates to his 'golden' period which is the focus of the articles in this Special Issue. Novels produced during this period include: The Mighty Walzer (1999), Kalooki Nights (2006), The Finkler Question (2010), J: A Novel (2014) and Shylock Is My Name (2016). Jacobson's growing confidence--moving between the individual and the collective, between comedy and tragedy, and between realism and experimentalism--will be at the heart of the introduction.
What is clear from even a cursory reading of Muriel Spark's dazzling and cunning fictions is that she engages with a bewildering range of literary modes but only in so far as they can be subsumed by ...her singular vision. Spark's quirky and playful voice refuses to be contained by any one doctrine or identity. First among the philosophies and identities which she finds absurd is that of the conventional realist novel with its humanist assumptions that the plot of a novel, with the individual at its heart, can be confused with life. This essay will juxtapose Spark's scepticism in relation to the conventional novel form with the fierce self-protection of her life-story (before she was a novelist) which she, paradoxically, refigures in many of her imaginative works. The focus is on her fictions set in Africa where she felt at her most vulnerable as the potential object of various 'shooting affairs'. It will show the ways in which she redeems such trauma in her late fiction. In the dismissal of the human-centred realist novel, and the fantasy that individuals can control the world, Spark, is equally anarchic and orthodox; playful and controlling.
“Enthusiast”: A Response to the Responses
The Cambridge journal of postcolonial literary inquiry/Cambridge journal of postcolonial literary inquiry
Journal Article
PDF
