The present dissertation asserts that certain works of Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Bitov and Sasha Sokolov constitute a distinct aesthetic movement in Russian literature of the sixties and seventies, ...which, given the insidious effect of the grossly reductive and spurious policy of Socialist Realism, revitalized the Russian language and restored Russian literature to its position as a center of aesthetic and moral power. Brodsky's work, in particular his poems, Ostanovka v pustyne (1966) and Babochka (1972), became the credo for this intensely spiritual activity, while Bitov's early povest', Zhizn'v vetrenuiu pogodu (1963), reintroduced traditional themes and motifs to Russian literature in a wholly apolitical context. The apogee of this movement is Sasha Sokolov's first novel Shkola dlia durakov (1976). Written in the highly ornamental style of pletenie sloves, of which the best example in Russian literature is Epifanii Premudryi's The Life of St. Stefan of Perm' (c. 1392), Shkola dlia durakov presents three contemporary Russian saints: Nymphea, Pavl/Savl Norvegov and the Nasylaiushchii veter. By virtue of Sokolov's creative use of language and style, these holy figures, powerful cultural icons, extol the virtue of integrity and the spirit of imagination and thereby, redeem and replenish Russian culture. Chapter One provides interesting historical parallels between the cultural milieu in Russia at the time Epifanii Premudryi wrote The Life of St. Stefan and the cultural milieu in Soviet Russia, particularly after the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, which support my thesis. Chapter Two details Brodsky's "neo-Acmeism" and Bitov's subtle use of intertextual reference, which form a significant part of their contributions to this uniquely apolitical movement. Chapter Three explores the origins and development of the style of pletenie sloves and demonstrates its reemergence in Shkola dlia durakov, where it creates the saintly figures of Norvegov and the Nasylaiushchii veter. Chapter Four introduces Nymphea, the adolescent schizophrenic narrator of the text, and several female figures and explains their significance in this modern hagiography. Chapter Five concludes this interpretation and discusses the implications for Russian literature and culture.
This dissertation examines the filmic and literary texts written by Jurek Becker in East and West Germany from 1962 to 1992. Born to a Jewish family in Poland in 1937, Becker survived the Holocaust ...and with his father--also a Holocaust survivor--settled in East Berlin. After beginning his literary career writing screenplays, he moved on to become one of the German Democratic Republic's most prominent authors. In 1977 he left the GDR to live in West Germany. Questions of identity and belonging permeate Becker's biography. These questions resonate throughout his work. My analyses of Becker's texts focus on identity and the ways it is constructed. After discussing definitions of identity in chapter one, I use chapter two to examine the discourses of stability in Becker's early screenplays and reveal how these discourses work within the context of official attempts to construct a stable identity for the GDR. In the third chapter, I show how the novels Jurek Becker wrote in the GDR acknowledge that society has certain dominant discourses that it calls true and makes into the building blocks of identity. Becker's works call for a greater understanding of the power these discourses yield and ultimately demand greater plurality within dominant discourses. Becker's texts also bear witness to the possibility that multiple discourses and multiple truths can co-exist in a way that those in power in both the East and the West view(ed) as threatening. Both chapters two and three use approaches espoused by New Historicists to contextualize Becker's texts within the discourses circulating in the GDR at the time. In my fourth chapter, I adopt the feminist theories, especially the notions of agency and positionality, to explain the increased representations of bodies within the texts Becker wrote in the West. In my study of the link between bodies and subjectivity, I show that the texts do not espouse an escape into the self, but call instead for a notion of identity that acknowledges multiplicities and allows for the re-politicization of the individual and identity.
This is a work of creative nonfiction, an articulation of four generations of family—a sociocultural history and study—that uses the “poetry of witness,” in this case “Holocaust and post-Holocaust ...poetry,” as its primary medium of expression. The poetry manuscript, which is presented chronologically and is divided into four sections: 1900–1950, 1920–1970, 1940–1990, and 1970–2020, bears the section title, “Revelation,” and is bracketed by an introductory section, “Creation,” and a concluding section, “Redemption.” These titles are based on the writings of Gershom Scholem wherein he discusses “the three themes in which God's relation to the world and to man was traditionally represented: the themes of the Creation, Revelation, and Redemption” (1974). The sections “Creation” and “Redemption” contain both contextual and content-based essays on the creative process, the representative text, responses to violence and genocide and how they can be mediated by the arts—most specifically poetry, teaching as a way of “bearing witness,” and philosophies of education which seek to unify experience and knowledge. The essays attempt to complement the poetry manuscript by staying within the genre of creative nonfiction, and are liberally infused with poetry, musings, and personal explorations; they have been strongly influenced by the much greater contributions to teaching, scholarship, and writing made by Joseph Campbell, Teilhard de Chardin, John Dewey, Paulo Freire, Vera John-Steiner, Czeslaw Milosz, Toni Morrison, Margaret Randall, Laurel Richardson, Joyce Rogers, Carl Sagan, Rudolph Steiner, Ronald Takaki, and Elie Wiesel.
This dissertation examines a new literary phenomenon—the Native American Postmodern—Mimetic novel. This genre is heralded by N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, and it is exemplified by his ...subsequent novel, The Ancient Child. It consists of the real-world difficulties of Native Americans overlaid with postmodern literary techniques to create a unique dialogical narrative.
Jurek Becker (1937-1997) was a prominent postwar German author whose seven novels, short stories, and films treat Jewish and East German themes. Born in Lodz, Poland in 1937 to Jewish parents, Becker ...was interned in the Lodz ghetto from 1939-1944, and in the concentration camps of Ravensbruck and Sachsenhausen. After the war he lived with his father in East Berlin, learning German at the age of nine. The aim of this study is to interpret Becker's novels Jakob der Lugner (1969), Irrefuhrung der Behorden (1973), and Aller Welt Freund (1982) by comparing the novels' main characters with character types with well-developed traditions: the schlemiel, picaro, and Willenloser. The use of "character" in my dissertation refers to fictional types. Although Jakob der Lugner has won several awards and been translated into over twenty languages, critics have not fully developed its relationship to modern Yiddish literature. By comparing Jacob Heym with the Yiddish schlemile, a type of Jewish fool, one acquires a better sense of the warring opposites which inform the novel's structure and theme. Chapter one develops four major traits associated with the schlemiel in modern Yiddish fiction and in Jacob Heym: foolishness, Heroism, comic misrepresentation of reality, and the inversion of accepted judgments. Irrefuhrung der Behoorden treats a central theme in Becker's oeuvre--opportunism, which involves adapting oneself to circumstances. The picaro, originally a Spanish rogue, is a literary protrait of an opportunism is the result of social factors in East Germany by tracing the historical development of the picaro from sixteenth century Spain to postwar German fiction. Despite Aller Welt Freund's treatment of the main character's problem from a variety of angles, scholars have been unsuccussful in describing it fully. In chapter three I discuss the Willenloser, a German term for a character with a paralysis of the will, in Russian, Spanish, Austrian, and East German fiction. I then compare Becker's Kilian with the Willenloser in order to interpret his problem and to demonstrate the novel's thematic unity.
There Are So Many Things That Can Kill You is a collection of nine short stories. The collection is introduced by a critical essay which discusses the ways in which the author's early experience ...listening to bearing witness narratives has influenced the structure of the stories. The stories are then discussed in terms of the formal elements of fiction, including plot, setting, character development, point of view and prose style.
This dissertation chronicles the first ten-year period of the Jewish Repertory Theater (JRT) in New York City and examines Ran Avni's role as its co-founder and artistic director. I have studied this ...particular company because it is in the forefront of the newly-emerging American Jewish theater. In fact, the JRT can be taken as a prototypical theater in this movement. I have looked at the JRT, not only in relation to the current Jewish theater scene, but also within the continuum of Jewish theater history. The opening chapter, in fact, surveys Jewish theater from earliest times to the present. In surveying the JRT, the following questions were posed: What is Jewish theater today? What significance does it have to its audiences? How does it compare to the Yiddish theater of a century ago? Two chapters in this study deal with the JRT's chronological development, production by production. One chapter reports on the early life and professional growth of Ran Avni. A further chapter focusses on the playwrights-in-residence program, describing the playwrights' contributions. Another chapter, based on a questionnaire survey, examines the JRT audience and its attitudes. What emerges from the dissertation is that no single answer was found to the posed questions: What is contemporary Jewish theater? How is it defined? What is its purpose? Jewish theater is no longer defined by a unique language, as in earlier times, and must seek other answers for its raison d'etre. The current practitioners are still groping for those answers, although those interviewed agreed that Jewish theater has to do with the "Jewish experience," both current and past experience. My conclusion is that the Jewish Repertory Theater has proved to be durable and successful, but that it is in a state of continuing growth and exploration, and it seeks those answers with each new season.
In preparing for my thesis role as Octavius Robinson in Shaw's Man and Superman, I faced the same acting challenges that dominated my first year of training: playing actions, confronting the reality ...of the situation, finding courage, exercising good judgment, and trusting both myself and the text. Scholarly research helped me understand the comic and philosophic elements of the play. As a result, I discovered where I fit in the story and how the presence of Octavius enables Shaw to make his points about romantic attraction. Besides my director's instruction, I relied on Shaw's own advice and that of his contemporaries for the handling of the rhetoric. I identified closely with the perception of Octavius as poor artist and ineffectual lover; my disdain for the role precluded my playing him fairly and openheartedly. Only after a meeting with another professor and a rethinking of Shaw himself did I feel sufficient to take the stage.
My dissertation maintains that Isaac Bashevis Singer's art is useful in the promotion of understanding among different groups and in the exploration of the conflicts inherent in the development of ...human individuality. I attempt to demonstrate that the unity and continuity of Singer's oeuvre derive from its being intricately connected with his own development as a person. My central thesis is that Singer used his work as an aid to his own growth, and that, through his novels and children's stories, he searched for a benevolent God and an idealistic relationship between men and women. I discuss the children's stories "Growing Up," "The Milk of a Lioness," and "Menashe and Rachel," as well as the novels The Slave, The Magician of Lublin, Enemies, and Shosha. My method is biographical and psychological. I see personality at the center of art, science, and history, and I believe that there is a natural, powerful urge toward the unfolding of the self. I use Third-Force psychology as well as psychoanalysis to discuss Singer's life and writings. I also take into account feminist criticism of Singer's work. Since I believe that Singer could have never been a feminist in the modern sense, and that there are different manners of honoring the interdependence of male and female, I seek to show that despite his predilection for Schopenhauer and his patriarchal upbringing, Singer regarded women very highly (though not unambivalently), expected a great deal from them, and could not conceive of life without the company of women.
