Name der Zeitschrift: Naharaim Jahrgang: 10 Heft: 2 Seiten: 195-213.

This article focuses on the cultural world of Jewish women in Eastern Europe between the 16th century and the beginning of the 19th century. It reveals the extent to which Yiddish language and literature were a means of gaining knowledge for such women. This is because Yiddish - a Jewish language that developed around 1000 years ago among the Jews living in Ashkenaz - was the language of the people, of ordinary life, of business and social relations, (...) and also of the home and the kitchen. It was the language of female spaces, stigmatized by its ‘humble’ associations with women and uncultivated persons. In turn, Yiddish literature was closely associated with women and a female readership. (shrink)

Yizkor books are memorial books commemorating Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust, which are also the result of communal activity. The books have been published since 1943, mostly in Israel. Based on a qualitative and quantitative survey of 613 books, the largest survey of Yizkor books done to date, this article repositions the books linguistically and geographically. It demonstrates that contrary to previous research, Yizkor books are a significantly more heterogeneous phenomenon that began in the Yiddish­-speaking world but quickly (...) changed into an Israeli­- and Hebrew­-based phenomenon, which also included Jews from non­-Yiddish­-speaking Ashkenazi, and even Sephardic, communities. Especially since the 1980s, the phenomenon further evolved to include more English­-language books, published in the USA. Against this geographical and linguistic backdrop, I also show that the producers of the books were a diverse array of groups and individuals from varying backgrounds. The publishers were not only Yiddish­-speaking landsmanschaftn (Jewish mutual­-aid societies consisting of individuals originating from a particular place and their descendants) but a variety of organizations of different kinds, individuals, and even schoolchildren. Finally, I present examples of Yizkor books that were presented in previous research as landsmanschaft literature produced by Holocaust survivors and show that these assumptions regarding the authors are partially or wholly erroneous and that those books were, in fact, produced by a different set of actors. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Naharaim Jahrgang: 10 Heft: 2 Seiten: 215-244.

While Hermann Levin Goldschmidt didn’t read Yiddish anarchists, there seems to have been a convergent evolution in their thinking. Goldschmidt’s looking up to Jewish lore as a source of liberating creativity is commonly encountered in Yiddish anarchist texts. His view of action as a constant response to internal and external challenges in the struggle for an open future is developed by Isaac Nachman Steinberg on the basis of nineteenth-century vitalism. Goldschmidt’s theory of anarchist individualism as willed self-limiting solidarity (...) has a compelling parallel in Hillel Solotaroff’s view of history. His use of impressionism and photography to eternalize the immediacy of human actuality is akin to Rudolf Rocker’s championing of decadent literature. In both cases, the goal of anarchism is not a dictatorship of the former downtrodden, but a continuous and contradictory evolution of freedom in ever-changing contexts. (shrink)

When introducing a collection of essays on Yiddish, Joseph Sherman asserted, among other things, that: Although the Nazi Holocaust effectively destroyed Yiddish together with the Jews of Eastern Europe for whom it was a lingua franca, the Yiddish language, its literature and culture have proven remarkably resilient. Against all odds, Yiddish has survived to become a focus of serious intellectual, artistic and scholarly activity in the sixty-odd years that have passed since the end of World (...) War II. From linguistic and literary research in the leading universities of the world to the dedicated creativity of contemporary novelists and poets in Israel and America, from the adaptation of Yiddish words and phrases to the uses of daily newspapers in English to the elevation of Yiddish as a new loshn koydesh by Hasidic sects, from the publication of new writing to the translation of its established canonical works into modern European languages, Yiddish is continually reminding the world of its vibrancy, relevance and importance as a marker of Jewish identity and survival. (shrink)

The focus of my article is a unique place, the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, which connects Yiddish culture with the American one, the experience of the Holocaust with the descendants of the survivors, and a modern idea of Jewishness with the context of American postmodernity. Created in the 1980s, in the mind of a young and enthusiastic student Aaron Lansky, the Yiddish Book Center throughout the years has become a unique place on the American cultural (...) map. Traversing the continents and crossing borders, Lansky and his co-workers for over thirty years have been saving Yiddish language books from extinction. The Center, however, has long stopped to be merely a storage house for the collection, but instead has grown into a vibrant hub of Yiddishkeit in the United States. Its employees do not only collect, distribute, digitalize and post online the forgotten volumes, but also engage in diverse activities, scholarly and cultural, that promote the survival of the tradition connected with Yiddish culture. They educate, offering internships and fellowships to students interested in learning Yiddish from across the world, translate, publish, and exhibit Yiddish language materials, in this way finding new users for the language whose speakers were virtually annihilated by the Holocaust. To honour their legacy, a separate project is aimed at conducting video interviews that record life testimonies of the speakers of Yiddish. Aaron Lansky’s 2004 memoir, Outwitting History, provides an interesting insight into the complexities of his arduous life mission. Today, the Center lives its own unique life, serving the world of academia and Yiddishkeit enthusiasts alike. (shrink)

Before Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2009 production A Serious Man, Jewish motifs have consistently appeared in their cinematic output. However, the Jewish characters functioned in an ethnically diverse setting and rarely took centre stage, with the notable exception of the eponymous struggling leftist playwright in Barton Fink. Nevertheless, even here the Jewishness seemed to be universalized into “humanity.” Elsewhere, through their accessory characters, the Coens primarily offered a nod to the illustrious and/or notorious Jewish presence in various spheres of American (...) society. In addition, steadfast religious observance has been an object of affable ridicule. A Serious Man, however, reveals an unprecedented strategy. Described by the Coens as their most autobiographical film to date, it has a predominantly Jewish cast, deals almost exclusively with a Jewish community in the Midwest, and is heavily steeped in themes which have long been the staple of the Jewish literary tradition. Most evident is the familiar figure of the schlemiel, the eternal loser, embodied in the protagonist Larry Gopnik, whose seemingly endless predicaments form the spine of the plot. Marketed as a comedy, A Serious Man nevertheless consistently exhibits a dark, existential undercurrent, which renders its decidedly grim ending a rather logical payoff. Drawing on the research of seminal scholars on the subject of schlemiel narratives, the essay is an attempt to situate the film within this tradition. Furthermore, I argue that the Coens reinvest the figure of the schlemiel with a philosophical charge that it possessed in folk legends and Yiddish literature; at the same time, they adapt the schlemiel to the postmodern condition. This allows them to address the fundamental uncertainty of our age, signalled in the film through the formulae of Heisenberg and Schrödinger. (shrink)

In the summer of 1991, the first issue of the Israeli journal Teoria Ubikoret published an essay of mine on Anton Shammas, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, who wrote the Hebrew novel Arabeskot .1 In this essay I traced Shammas's subversion of the Jewish ethnocentrism of the Hebrew literary canon.2 Shammas's novel reveals how the Hebrew canon in Israel, in the guise of the apparently neutral term Hebrew Literature, which only apparently bases itself on the Hebrew language as the (...) common literary language of Jews and Arabs, has in fact imposed an exclusionary policy. That is, in order to enter its realm, those who write in Hebrew must be Jewish. Shammas, I argued, sought to de-Judaize the Hebrew language and turn it into a language shared by all Israelis, Jews and Arabs alike.Now, twenty years later, Teoria Ubikoret has published a different essay of mine, this time on Tuvya haholev , Dan Miron's Hebrew translation of the great Yiddish writer Shalom Aleichem's novel Tevye der Milhiker. I claim that while Miron's Hebrew indeed Hebraicizes Aleichem's Yiddish, it also moves in the opposite direction; it Yiddishizes Hebrew, giving Yiddish a prominent presence in the Hebrew translation and thus decentering Israeli subjectivity and undermining the cohesive force of Hebrew.3 · 1. See Anton Shammas, Arabeskot ; trans.Vivien Eden under the title Arabesques.· 2. See Hannan Hever, “Ivrit be-eto shel aravi,” Teoria Ubikoret 1 : 23–38, “Hebrew in an Israeli Arab Hand: Six Miniatures on Anton Shammas's Arabesques,” The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, ed. Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd , pp. 264–93, andProducing the Modern Hebrew Canon: Nation Building and Minority Discourse , pp. 175–204.· 3. See Hever, “Tuvia haholev beivrit,” review of Tuvya Haholev by Shalom Aleichem, trans. Dan Miron,Teoria Ubikoret 36 : 227–30. (shrink)

Reviews/interviews Capital Ellowen Deeowen: A Review of The Making of London: London in Contemporary Literature by Sebastian Groes - Adam Sumera Deconstruction and Liberation: A Review of Simon Glendinning’s Derrida - Wit Pietrzak Authenticity, Transdifference, Survivance: Native American Identity Masked: A Review of Native Authenticity: Transnational Perspectives on Native American Literary Studies, ed. Deborah L. Madsen - Monika Kocot Literature, the Arab Diaspora, Gender and Politics - Fadia Faqir Speaks with Maria Assif Absent Fathers, Outsider Perspectives and (...) class='Hi'>Yiddish Typewriters - Norman Ravvin Talks to Krzysztof Majer. (shrink)

When Emanuel Ringelblum was born on November 21, 1900, in Buczacz, the small, multilingual and multi-ethnic Galician town was to be found on the far northeastern part of the Austrian Empire. As a mail stamp on a Correspondenz-Karte or Karta korrespondencyja of 1890 shows, the place was officially spelled in accordance with its Polish orthography. However, it was called Butschtasch in German, Bichuch in Yiddish, and still differently in Ukranian. After World War I, it was for a short while (...) part of Ukrania, and subsequently became Polish, then Soviet, and Ukranian again in the aftermath of the end of the Soviet Union. Ringelblum's cousin, Shmuel Josef Agnon, was also born in Buczacz. But their lives were to diverge in most respects. Agnon is remembered as one of the leading authors of modern Hebrew belles-lettres who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1966. And one remembers Ringelblum as the one who, with utmost and relentless courage, organized the underground archive Oyneg Shabes in the Warsaw ghetto. Samuel D. Kassow, the expert on the history of Oyneg Shabes and the author of a brilliant monograph on this subject, asserts that “more than anyone else it was Emanuel Ringelblum who encouraged individuals to write, who organized and conceptualized the archive, and who transformed it into a powerful center of civil resistance”. (shrink)

Applying an ecocritical lens to Holocaust literature, this paper explores the connection between the natural world and the seemingly unnatural machinations of the Holocaust by placing two writers in conversation: Abraham Sutzkever and Vasily Grossman. For Sutzkever, the famed Yiddish poet of Vilna, poetry was linked to survival and to the environment, sometimes emerging from a bog, wilderness, or mutilated landscape but shining all the more brightly for its mired origins. Grossman, another important documenter of the Holocaust, was (...) a Soviet-Jewish writer known for his reportage, fiction, and compilations of Jewish documents from the Second World War. Like Sutzkever, Grossman was occupied in his work with the earth and its animate and inanimate inhabitants, from the crying stones and soil of Treblinka to the red sunset of a humanity ravaged by genocide. When faced with the almost unnarratable desolation and loss encountered during the Holocaust, both authors turned to their environment as a literary tool, a means of conveying that which could not be conveyed through traditional or accepted language. Nature and the nonhuman world became vehicles for an exploration of trauma and violence that in many ways extended beyond human comprehension, and therefore required a mode of imagining that similarly extended beyond human experience alone. At the same time, both Sutzkever and Grossman can be seen attempting to allow nonhuman nature to speak in its own voice, however inflected by human perspectives the hearing and translation of that voice may be. This paper therefore reveals and highlights the importance of addressing the interactions between human and nonhuman nature in Holocaust literature. (shrink)

This essay reads Der Verschollene in the context of Prague cultural Zionism and its conflict between Western Jewish assimilation and Eastern Jewish “authenticity.” The novel’s symbolic network articulates Kafka’s problematic relationship to cultural Zion-ist thought, his valorization of Yiddish culture, and his ambivalent understanding of his literary identity as an assimilated Western Jew. As Karl travels West, he paradoxically travels East: through the embodiment of Yiddish by his doubles (Delamarche, Robinson) and the return of Kafka’s “black” Eastern Jewish (...) actor friend Löwy from beneath “Negro,” Karl moves toward a “Teater von Oklahama” that is a symbolic “Yiddish Theater.” The West of Oklahama figures the “primitive,” “authentic” Eastern European East; however, the ambiguous metaphors that permit this progression toward “Zion” likewise ensure its ultimate instability. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Discourses of Jewish Identity in Twentieth-Century FranceEllen S. FineDiscourses of Jewish Identity in Twentieth-Century France, edited by Alan Astro; Yale French Studies 265pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994, $17.00.Ever since France became the first European country to grant Jews equal rights as citizens with the enactment of the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1791, the question of identity has been a central preoccupation of French (...) Jews. Their emancipation brought about assimilation to the universalist principles of the French Republic and led them to detach themselves from their own traditions, generating conflicting emotions about what it meant for a Jew to be French. The topic of French-Jewish identity has been reflected upon by writers ranging from Sartre, Memmi, and Misrahi to Levinas and Finkielkraut, none of whose discourses are included in this volume but whose ideas are discussed in Seth Wolitz’s pertinent article, “Imagining the Jew in France: From 1945 to the Present.”Divided into two main sections, “Literary Texts” and “Cultural Contexts,” this collection contains articles written by authors not familiar to English speaking readers. They are excellently translated, mainly by the editor, Alan Astro. In his introductory essay, Astro notes that his aim is to portray the cultural and ethnic diversity of French Jews of different origins and to show their part in the formation of Jewish identity. The focus is on how French Jews feel about their own identity, and not on how others see them.The first section, “Literary Texts,” represents a variety of genres, generally fiction. Over half of the thirteen texts date from the 1970s to the present, and are mostly personal narratives, anecdotal in nature. The tone often conveys “a certain humor or self-irony,” described by Rachel Ertel in her essay, “A Minority Literature” (in the second section) as identifiable traits of a Jewish work.With no logical sequence to the presentation of the texts, a multiplicity of perspectives is clearly the objective. For example, Bernard Frank, whose ancestors have lived in France since the Revolution, feels “as French as anyone else,” yet recognizes that Jews are different, “because they’ve been made to be different.” Wolf Wieviorka in 1936 exalts his “noble pedigree,” being a naturalized French citizen; he was later murdered by the Nazis.North African Jews who emigrated to Paris in the 1950s and early 1960s, studied sociologically by Michel Abitbol, are portrayed in Gil Ben Aych’s novel, The Chant of Being (Algerian), and in Paula Jacques’s novel, Aunt Carlotta’s Legacy (Egyptian). Jews of Eastern European descent are depicted in the short stories by Cyrille Fleischman, one of which recounts how a Sorbonne professor of sixteenth-century French literature renounces his eminent career and like his father, opens up a delicatessen in the Jewish quarter of the Marais, thus returning to his roots. Henri Raczymow returns imaginatively to a pre-war Poland in Tales of Exile and Forgetfulness, recreating in French the intonations of Yiddish, the language of his grandparents who died in the Holocaust. In an [End Page 378] outstanding essay, “Memory Shot Through With Holes,” Raczymow articulates urgent questions posed by the second generation: “By what right could I speak, I who was not a victim, survivor or witness?”If the first section is multicultural, the second, “Cultural Contexts,” is interdisciplinary. Annette Wieviorka (granddaughter of Wolf Wieviorka) studies accounts by survivors, revealing the impact of Vichy’s imposing a Jewish identity on its citizens. Wieviorka also evokes the importance of the Six-Day War which compelled assimilated French Jews to proclaim their Jewish allegiance, a pivotal event transforming their sense of identity.Other significant contributions are Gérard Haddad’s exploration of the importance of Judaism in the life and work of Jacques Lacan, an outsider who seemed more concerned with Jewish identity than his fellow psychoanalysts. Ora Avni analyzes Patrick Modiano’s repudiation of his Jewish patrimony in his seminal novel, La Place de l’étoile. Elizabeth de Fontenay comments on how the quant-à-soi (“keeping to oneself”), the reserve characteristic of the French, becomes the quant-à-nous (“ourselves”) for the French Jew who is linked to a community beyond the... (shrink)

L'avènement de l'imprimerie suscite dans le monde du judaïsme aschénaze un formidable élan de la langue yiddish. Simultanèment les grands textes sacrés sont traduits de l'hébreu et une production originale innerve tous les milieux. Pourtant, très vite, le yiddish est associé à l'émergence d'une littérature « religieuse » destinée aux femmes ou même écrite par elles, au point qu'un caractère typographique, le waybertaytch (« yiddish des femmes ») lui est réservé. C'est ce phénomène que l'auteur interroge dans (...) l'éclairage d'une recherche anthropologique sur la place des femmes dans la culture juive. Au sein de celle-ci, un rapport dialectique unit et sépare le féminin et le religieux selon un partage établi qui soumet les hommes à l'ordre de la lettre hébraïque et les femmes à l'ordre de la coutume. Traduire la Torah en yiddish, permettre que les femmes écrivent dans cette même langue, n'est-ce pas reconnaître la « part féminine » du religieux juif, celle qui leur revient comme le disent si bien les mythes et les rites qui associent la Torah et les femmes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 10.2 (2000) 175-188 [Access article in PDF] Scope Note 38 Bioethics Resources on the Web * Once described as an "enormous used book store with volumes stacked on shelves and tables and overflowing onto the floor" (Pool, Robert. 1994. Turning an Info-Glut into a Library. Science 266 (7 October): 20-22, p. 20), Internet resources now receive numerous levels of organization, from basic directory listings (...) to elaborate "links" (cross-references to other Internet documents) that flash and glow in the dark. In many ways, the Internet functions as a direct extension of the traditional library. Following linked references across various sites is an electronic version of browsing library stacks, and the serendipitous discoveries made while "surfing the Net" recall the wonders of physically going "book-to-book." Although many of the Internet's best aspects augment library strengths by eliminating physical distance from sources, Net resources pose unique problems for researchers. It is not always clear who is responsible for the content of Web documents, when the document was produced, or how often (if ever) it is updated. Internet resource tools, then, must enable researchers to identify appropriate resources and to evaluate what they find when they get there. Web Research as Taking "Snapshots" Given the Internet's visual nature and fluid content, the process of conducting research on the Web has been likened to taking an informal picture of information on a specific date at a particular time. This metaphor also conveys the "zoom-in" aspect of searching through Web pages by going from general to specific categories. In the first section of this Scope Note, National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature (NRCBL) staff present a snapshot of bioethics resources taken during the spring months of 2000. Entries are divided into the categories of directories, electronic journals, full-text documents, news/current awareness, and teaching resources. In the two subsequent sections, this series of categories is repeated for entries on a specific topic within bioethics-genetics-and again for general search and evaluation tools. Where a Web site may contain pages applicable [End Page 175] to more than one category, multiple entries are made for that site with appropriate information for each category.Much as telecommunication advances have strengthened the relationship of patients and providers as partners, the dynamic nature of the Internet acknowledges that the researcher functions as a librarian whenever accessing the Web. It is our hope that BIOETHICSLINE and the other NRCBL databases not only will enable researchers to search the Web more efficiently, but also will help them to evaluate what they find when they get there. Bioethicsline on the Web: An International Plan in Progress Once only available through libraries, the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), the funding agency for the ongoing development of the BIOETHICS LINE® database from the Kennedy Institute, has provided free Web access to that database of 63,000 citations since September 1998 through Internet Grateful Med. Plans are now underway to eliminate such specialty databases and incorporate all citations into PubMed (for journal articles) or LOCATORplus (for book-like materials and chapters in books). Both of these databases are likewise available at no cost on the Web. In the transition to PubMed and LOCATORplus some features of BIOETHICSLINE that presently are available may be lost. Researchers are encouraged to contact the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature with search requests or for search strategy assistance with either the current or the future system ([email protected]).The inclusion of bioethics citations in PubMed and LOCATORplus will have several advantages. First, unique keywords from the Bioethics Thesaurus will be considered for inclusion in Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), the indexing vocabulary for PubMed and LOCATORplus, thereby enhancing retrieval of relevant clinical literature by offering more precise terminology covering ethical issues. Second, it will be easier to identify foreign-language materials, which are not currently included in the scope of BIOETHICSLINE. Third, the updating schedule will become more frequent. On the other hand, there may be some loss of searching precision because certain specialized features... (shrink)

In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright. Throughout, Bell revisits issues of genre with an eye toward the unexpected details of authors' lives, and invites us to (...) reconsider the hidden functions that terms such as "romanticism" and "realism" served for authors and their critics. Whether tracing the demands of the market or the expectations of readers, Bell examines the intimate relationship between literary production and culture; each essay closely links the milieu in which American writers worked with the trajectory of their storied careers. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

A distinguished group of authors reflects on problems currently enlivening the space shared by philosophy and literary theory in a series of chapters that range in scope from Plato to postmodernism.

Objective Apeiron was founded in 1966 and has developed into one of the oldest and most distinguished journals dedicated to the study of ancient philosophy, ancient science, and, in particular, of problems that concern both fields. Apeiron is committed to publishing high-quality research papers in these areas of ancient Greco-Roman intellectual history; it also welcomes submission of articles dealing with the reception of ancient philosophical and scientific ideas in the later western tradition. The journal appears quarterly. Articles are peer-reviewed on (...) a double-blind basis. Topics ancient philosophy ancient science reception of ancient philosophical and scientific ideas in the later western tradition Article formats Original Articles. (shrink)

During the late eighteenth century the Bible underwent a shift in interpretation so radical as to make it virtually a different book from what it had been a hundred years earlier. Even as its text was being revealed as neither stable nor original, the new notion of the Bible as a cultural artefact became a paradigm for all literature. In Origins of Narrative one of the world's leading scholars in biblical interpretation, criticism and theory describes how, while formal religion (...) declined, the prestige of the Bible as a literary and aesthetic model rose to new heights: not merely was English, German and French Romanticism steeped in biblical references of a new kind, but hermeneutics and, increasingly, theories of literature and criticism were biblically derived. Professor Prickett reveals how the Romantic Bible became simultaneously a novel-like narrative work, an on-going site of re-interpretation, and an all-embracing literary form giving meaning to all other writing. (shrink)

Richly illustrated study drawing on art, literature and science to explore Victorian attitudes towards sight.

Introduction: Dignity is one of the most important values sensitively perceived by patients in nursing care. Older patients have been identified as having a high risk of losing their dignity in institutional care. To promote optimum nursing care, a deeper insight into the problem of older patients’ dignity is needed. Aim: The aim was to identify, analyse and synthesise the qualitative evidence of dignity views and factors affecting it from the nurses’ and older patients’ perspective in the context of nursing (...) care and to compare synthesised finding from the both perspective. Methods: A literature review of qualitative evidence was chosen as a study design. The ENTREQ statement was implemented to enhance transparency. The CASP – Qualitative checklist and the thematic synthesis for synthesised findings were used. The electronic databases Academic Search Complete, CINAHL, Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition, MEDLINE and PROQUEST were used to gather information for qualitative studies. Results: A total of 306 papers were retrieved. Fourteen qualitative studies met the inclusion criteria and were included in the review after methodological quality assessment using CASP. Four main themes of dignity from nurses’ perspective were synthesised: seeing the patient as a unique person, communication and privacy, involving the patient, and working culture and environment. From the patients’ perspective, six main themes were synthesised: autonomy and control, privacy, relationships, care and comfort, communication and identity. The comparison shows that the key difference is that older patients highlighted the theme relationships and nurses underlined the theme working culture and environment. Conclusion: The model structures of the older patients’ dignity from both the nurses’ and patients’ perspectives support the idea of a multidimensional structure of human dignity. The resulting model might be used in a nursing self-reflection, in the management of the institutions providing all-day care for the older people and in the education and practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Is Literature? What Is Art?Integrating Essence and HistoryJerry Farber (bio)I. Aesthetic ExperienceThere remains a widespread belief among literature professors that literature doesn't exist; that is, that it has no stable, transhistorical identity. The very term "literature," we are reminded, shifts its meaning from one century to another. And even if someone should insist that, when they talk about literature, they're not talking about (...) writings in general or a familiarity with books or whatever else the term "literature" may have signified in the past, but only about those texts that one might consider aesthetic, what has this person gained? Not much—since a literature professor who, in recent decades, has turned for answers to the philosophical study of aesthetics will have been likely to confront either a Wittgensteinian dismantling of "art" or, more commonly these days, an institutional theory that defines "art" not on the basis of any properties that it might possess or of any function that it might serve, but solely on the basis of its relation to a cultural institution that, in return, is identified in relation to "art." One might be forgiven for concluding that to follow this quest for essence from "literature" to "aesthetic" or "art" is to go from one sinking ship to another.So literature—as Terry Eagleton, for example, has continued to insist through two editions of his widely read Literary Theory: An Introduction1 —doesn't exist. Which makes it awkward to be a literature professor and helps to explain why so many of us have tried to reinvent ourselves as professors of something else. But this is by no means a mere problem of academic nomenclature, since more than a few of us continue to believe on some level (a level obviously below the graduate level) that there is something there all the same, something that is more stable and less culturally contingent than our theories tell us it is. We just don't know how to legitimize that belief. This dilemma tends to be reflected one way or another in [End Page 1] our teaching. We may repress any essentialist qualms and seek a lofty theoretical consistency as cultural historians for whom aesthetics is merely one more thing to situate—and we pass this disbelief in literature on to our students. Or we may learn to live with cognitive dissonance and pass that on to our students. Literature is hardly alone among the arts in its identity problem, but it does seem to have a more advanced case.Someone came for a job interview on my campus a few years ago, fresh out of a fairly prestigious doctoral program. He made his presentation and then mentioned during the question period afterward that, in his classes, he did make an effort not to ignore a text's aesthetic qualities. He stopped, looked around apprehensively, and said, "I know the term's problematic, of course...""So how do you resolve that?" I asked.He shrugged. "I don't know really."Nonetheless, just as there has been a "return of the aesthetic" in broader terms, books and articles have been appearing from the mid-90s on, arguing for or heralding a reemergence of the aesthetic in literary study.2 Certainly this makes sense, if only as a way of trying to shore up our precarious position in the academy, since, as has been repeatedly observed, literary study, in the absence of any delimiting aesthetic criterion, simply dissolves into other disciplines. And if literature doesn't exist, why spend money on literature professors? Why not hire real historians, sociologists, philosophers, psychologists, etc., to do those more respectable and definable things we keep claiming we do? But still, practical motives aside, what is to be the theoretical basis for any return to literary aesthetics? Can this merely be a matter of fashion? Will "the return of the repressed" do as a justification?The time has come, I think, not to revert to a simple, blind faith in "literature" and "art," but to find a way of reconciling our stubborn essentialist belief, on one hand, and our constructionist perspective, on the other—a way of understanding and teaching literature... (shrink)

Literature is a complex and multifaceted expression of our humanity, one dimension of which is ethical content. This striking collection of new essays pursues a fuller and richer understanding of five of the central aspects of this ethical content. These aspects are: the question of character, its formation, and its role in moral discernment; poetic vision in the context of ethical understanding; literature's distinctive role in self-identity and self-understanding; patterns of moral growth and change that emerge from the (...) philosophical reading of literature; and the historical sources and genealogies of some of our most central contemporary conceptions of the ethical dimension of literature. The volume engages with literary work from Homer to J. M. Coetzee, Shakespeare to David Foster Wallace, and explores the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Levinas, and others. This rich collection presents some of the best new thinking about the ethical content that lies within literature, and it shows why our reflective absorption in literature is the humane--and humanizing--experience many of us have long taken it to be. (shrink)

Because of the transfer of responsibility from hospitals to community-based settings, providers in home-based care have more responsibilities and a wider range of tasks and responsibilities than before, often with limited resources. The increased responsibilities and the complexity of tasks and patient groups may lead to several ethical challenges. A systematic search in the databases MEDLINE, CINAHL, and SveMed+ was carried out in February 2019 and August 2020. The research question was translated into a modified PICO (Population, Intervention, Comparison, and (...) Outcome) worksheet. A total of 40 articles were included. The review is conducted according to the Vancouver Protocol. The main findings from the systematic literature review show that ethical challenges experienced by healthcare and social care providers in home-based care are related to autonomy and balancing ethical principles, decisions regarding intensity of care, challenges related to priority settings, truth-telling, and balancing the professional role. Findings regarding ethical challenges within home-based care are in line with findings from institutional healthcare and social care settings. However, some significant differences from the institutional context are also highlighted. (shrink)

In Shame and Necessity, Bernard Williams recounts that colleagues often ask why he analyses literary texts – why can’t he use examples from “real life”? He responds that “it is a perfectly good question, and it has a short answer: what philosophers will lay before themselves and their readers as an alternative to literature will not be life, but bad literature.” This anecdote contains an argument that would be readily embraced by any proponent of “post-structuralism.” Namely, it suggests (...) that no theory can solely be based on reason. Any rational account needs an – acknowledged or repressed – fictional support. We do not rely on pure concepts but rather on conceptual fictions. (shrink)

This forward-thinking, non-traditional reference work uniquely maps out how new developments in 21st century philosophy are entering into dialogue with the study of literature. Going beyond the familiar methods of analytic philosophy, and with a breadth greater than traditional literary theory, this collection looks at the profound consequences of the interaction between philosophy and literature for questions of ethics, politics, subjectivity, materiality, reality and the nature of the contemporary itself.

To demonstrate some manifestations of the integration of Vietnamese literature (in the case of Hồ Biểu Chánh), specifically with French literature, this paper will highlight the intersection of global and national characteristics in Vietnamese literature at that time, particularly in Hồ Biểu Chánh's adaptation of French literary works. Additionally, the paper employs analytical and synthetic methods to break down the research problems, thereby providing a clearer understanding of Hồ Biểu Chánh's unique features. This approach emphasizes the inheritance, (...) development, and originality in certain aspects of Hồ Biểu Chánh's integration with world literature in the early 20th century. (shrink)

While there are interesting connections between literature and evil, there is as of yet no systematic collection of models of evil to study literature. This is problematic, since literature is among other things an evaluative discourse and the most basic evaluative category is the polarity of good versus evil. In addition, evil shows important affinities with basic narratological principles. To initiate a discussion of models of evil for the analysis of literature, this article organizes a dozen (...) models of evil into four groups. The first consists of a core model which coincides with basic narratological elements in character analysis and narrative tension. The second group contains two pre-modern models of evil, defilement and moral-natural evil. The third group takes its cue from personality theory and proposes the five-factor model of personality and an enriched “dark triad,” and, to balance description against narration, a model which categorizes kinds of murder. The last group organizes six models around the thematic opposition between nature and society, an opposition which forms the backbone of Western philosophy and narrative. To test their validity, the models are applied to a series of literary examples/characters, above all Grendel, Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” and Carol Oates’ short story “Heat.”. (shrink)

The notion of aesthetic illusion relates to a number of art forms and media. Defined as a pleasurable mental state that emerges during the reception of texts and artefacts, it amounts to the reader's or viewer's sense of having entered the represented world while at the same time keeping a distance from it. Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and the Arts is an in-depth study of the main questions surrounding this experience of art as reality. Beginning with an introduction providing (...) historical background to modern discussions of illusion, it deals with a wide range of theoretical issues. The collection explores the nature and function of the aesthetic illusion as well as the role of affect and emotion, the implications of aesthetic illusion for the theory of fiction, the variable forms of aesthetic illusion and its relationship to other components of aesthetic response. Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and the Arts brings together a team of scholars from philosophy, literature and art and presents an interdisciplinary examination of a concept lying at the heart of contemporary aesthetics. (shrink)

"Time and the Museum: Literature, Phenomenology, and the Production of Radical Temporality, is the first explicit in-depth study of the nature of museum temporality. It argues as its departure point that the way in which museums have hitherto been understood as temporal in the scholarship - as spaces of death, othering, memory and history - is too simplistic, and has resulted in museum temporality being reduced to a strange heterotopia (Foucault) - something peculiar, and thus black boxed. However, to (...) understand the ways in which museum temporalities and timescapes are produced, and the consequences that these have upon display and visitor response, is crucial, because time is itself a political entity, with ethical consequence. Time and the Museum highlights something we all experience in some way - time - as a key ethical and political feature of the museum space. Utilizing the fields of literature and phenomenology, the book examines how time is experienced and performed in the public areas of three museum spaces within Oxford - the Ashmolean, Pitt Rivers, and Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Using concepts such as shape, structure, form, presence, absence, authenticity and aura, the book argues for a reconsideration of museum time as something with radical potential and political weight. It will appeal to academics and post"--. (shrink)

Novel Medicine: Healing, Literature, and Popular Knowledge in Early Modern China. By Andrew Schonebaum. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016. Pp. viii + 283. $50.