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OverviewWhy 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. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Neil LeviPublisher: Fordham University Press Imprint: Fordham University Press Dimensions: Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.80cm , Length: 22.90cm Weight: 0.499kg ISBN: 9780823255061ISBN 10: 0823255069 Pages: 272 Publication Date: 01 November 2013 Audience: Professional and scholarly , Professional & Vocational Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: In Print  This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us. Table of Contents"Acknowledgments Introduction: Phobic Reading, Modernist Form, and the Figure of the Antisemite Part I: Modernist Form as Judaization 1. Genealogies: Judaization, Wagner, Nordau 2. Jews, Art, and History: The Nazi Exhibition of ""Degenerate Art"" as Historicopolitical Spectacle 3. Fanatical Abstraction: Wyndham Lewis's Critique of Modernist Form as Judaization in Time and Western Man Part II: Modernist Form and the Antisemitic Imagination 4. Straw Men: Projection, Personification, and Narrative Form in Ulysses 5. Images of the Bilderverbot: Adorno, Antisemitism, and the Enemies of Modernism 6. The Labor of Late Modernist Poetics: Beckett after Celine Notes Bibliography Index"ReviewsIn this bold and original study, Neil Levi offers a radical unsettling of the relations between aesthetic modernism and the anti-Semitic imagination. Exploring the multiple fantasies and projections woven around notions of Judaism, Levi provides a deeply penetrating insight into modern literature s complex negotiations with the antisemitic imaginary. This is a book no student of modernism should ignore. --Peter Nicholls, New York University Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification is an essential contribution to the recent attempt to analyze the phantasms and ideological formations that configured the Jew as a dirty or polluting influence that supposedly permeated modern culture and played a distinctive role in its aesthetic productions. Levi is addressing issues that go beyond the aesthetic while nonetheless playing an important role in it. His analysis is fine-tuned and convincing both as literary criticism and as ideology critique. --Dominick LaCapra, Cornell University Neil Levi's brilliant reading of the relationship between Jewishness and modernism recodes the politics of modernism in a highly original and revealing way in a transnational field. From Wagner and Nordau via Wyndham Lewis and Joyce to Beckett and Adorno we are offered theoretically informed readings that cut through many misunderstandings of this riven field of fascism, modernism, and violence. It turns out that European literary modernism is deeply embedded in issues of Jewishness and anti-semitism. A must read for any scholar of modernism! --Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University Author InformationNeil Levi is Associate Professor of English at Drew University. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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