Modernist Form And The Myth Of Jewification

"This book argues that the antisemitic interpretation of modernist form as a symptom of a mobile, contagious Jewish spirit needs to be treated as integral to the history of European modernism. The notion of modernist form as Jewified lies at the heart of both a certain modernism's hostile reception, and its self-conception"--

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.

Modernist Time Ecology is a deeply interdisciplinary book that changes what we think literature and the arts can do for the world at large.

An obsession with “degeneration” was a central preoccupation of modernist culture at the start of the 20th century. Less attention has been paid to the fact that many of the key thinkers in “degeneration theory” – including Cesare Lombroso, Max Nordau, and Magnus Hirschfeld – were Jewish. Unfit: Jewish Degeneration and Modernism is the first in-depth study of the Jewish cultural roots of this strand of modernist thought and its legacies for modernist and contemporary culture. Marilyn Reizbaum explores how literary works from Bram Stoker's Dracula, through James Joyce's Ulysses to Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, the crime movies of Mervyn LeRoy, and the photography of Claude Cahun and Adi Nes manifest engagements with ideas of degeneration across the arts of the 20th century. This is a major new study that sheds new light on modernist thought, art and culture.

This book explores how Jewish American writers like Sholem Asch, Jacob Glatstein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anna Margolin, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley think of themselves as world writers, and the successes and failures that come with this role.

Around 1900, German and Austrian actresses had allure and status, apparent autonomy, and unconventional lifestyles. They presented a complex problem socially and aesthetically, one tied to the so-called Woman Question and to the contested status of modernity. For modernists, the actress's socioeconomic mobility and defiance of gender norms opened space to contest social and moral strictures, and her mutability offered a means to experiment with identity. For conservatives, on the other hand, female performance could support antifeminist convictions and validate masculine authority by positing woman as nothing but a false surface shaped by productive male forces. Influential male-authored texts from the period thereby disavowed female subjectivity per se by equating "woman" and "actress." S. E. Jackson establishes the actress as a key figure in a discursive matrix surrounding modernity, gender, and subjectivity. Her central argument is that because the figure of the actress bridged such varied fields of thought, women who were actresses had a consequential impact that resonated in and far beyond the theater - but has not been explored. Examining archival sources such as theater reviews and writing by actresses in direct relation to canonical aesthetic and philosophical texts, The Problem of the Actress reconstructs the constitutive role that womenplayed on and off the stage in shaping not only modernist theater aesthetics and performance practices, but also influential strains of modern thought.

Reveals the links, both positive and negative, between disabled bodies and aspects of modernism and modernity through readings of a wide range of literary texts

In Vanishing Vienna historian Frances Tanzer traces the reconstruction of Viennese culture from the 1938 German annexation through the early 1960s. The book reveals continuity in Vienna’s cultural history across this period and a framework for interpreting Viennese culture that relies on antisemitism, philosemitism, and a related discourse of Jewish presence and absence. This observation demands a new chronology of cultural reconstruction that links the Nazi and postwar years, and a new geography that includes the history of refugees from Nazi Vienna. Rather than presenting the Nazi, exile, and postwar periods as discrete chapters of Vienna’s history, Tanzer argues that they are part of a continuous spectrum of cultural evolution—the result of which was the creation of a coherent Austrian identity and culture that emerged by the 1950s. As she shows, antisemitism and philosemitism were not contradictory forces in post-Nazi Austrian culture. They were deeply interconnected aspirations in a city where nostalgia for the past dominated cultural reconstruction efforts and supported seemingly contradictory impulses. Viennese nostalgia at times concealed the perpetuation of antisemitic fantasies of the city without Jews. At the same time, the postwar desire to return to a pre-Nazi past relied upon notions of Austrian culture that Austrian Jews perfected in exile, as well as on the symbolic remigration of a mostly imagined “Jewish” culture now taxed with redeeming Austria in the aftermath of the Holocaust. From this perspective, philosemitism is much more than a simple inversion of antisemitism—instead, Tanzer argues, philosemitism, problematic as it may be, defines Vienna in the era of postwar reconstruction. In this way, Vanishing Vienna uncovers a rarely discussed phenomenon of the aftermath of the Holocaust—a society that consumes, redefines, and bestows symbolic meaning on the victims in their absence.