Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Jewish authors'

Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2004.<br>Thesis research directed by: English Language and Literature. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.

Philip Roth's parody of autobiography in the Zuckerman series is part of a larger debate concerning the problems of Jewish art. As Roth manipulates personal and personified autobiography, he both underlines and undermines Jewish traditions of reading and writing. To be sure, Zuckerman's struggle for artistic identity articulates a long-standing Jewish concern with the tensions of collective representation. It is from a culture consistently threatened by alienation and extermination that Roth finds his terms of reference. Zuckerman and his creator are subject to a whole discourse of Jewish textuality: to Jewish notions about the relationship between the individual and the group; between fact and fiction and between aesthetics and morality.<br>However, the Zuckerman books are at once part of a continuum of Jewish culture and a unique response to the pressures of contemporary American Judaism. Through his humorous manipulations of autobiographical fiction, Roth finally counter-turns the very compasses by which he has oriented himself. He offers a potent commentary on the fatuity of Jewish "facts" and on the fictitious nature of the collectivized Jewish voice. For Roth, it is not only the Jew's experience, but his/her imagination, his/her individual frame of understanding, that determines ethnic identity. In the end, Roth challenges the cohesion of the Jewish cultural text. He places himself in a house of mirrors, where life and art, self and group, Jewish reverence and Jewish rebellion, endlessly reflect off one another.

A partir dos contos da literatura ídiche clássica que foram traduzidos para o português, Sabá de Shólem Yákov Abramóvitsh, A leitora de Itzhok Leibusch Peretz e O relógio de Scholem Rabinovitch, este trabalho pretende investigar a representação do Shabat no contexto de uma literatura característica do alvorecer da modernidade judaica. O estudo individual de cada conto aprofundar-se-á na análise dos modos de representação de um evento religioso que cada conto apresenta. Para tanto, o conhecimento da biografia de seus autores foi de vital importância para o exame das obras, pois estes imprimiram em seus textos literários os ideais da Haskalá, por meio de seus narradores fidedignos, termo proposto por Wayne C. Booth, na obra A retórica da Ficção (1980), o qual revela a posição ideológica de seus autores implícitos nos contos. Esses autores implícitos uniram com maestria o dicotômico conceito tradição versus modernidade com o propósito de iluminar, a partir de dentro da comunidade do shtetl, o pensamento do judeu simples, visando transformá-lo em um homem moderno. Cientes de sua função social, Abramóvitsh, Peretz e Rabinovitch utilizaram a língua ídiche e a cultura do judeu do Leste europeu para instaurar um novo momento da literatura e cultura ídiche.<br>Departing from three Classical Yiddish short stories that have been translated to Portuguese - Mendele Moikher Seforim\'s Sabbath, Itzhok Leibusch Peretz\'s The Reader and Scholem Aleichem\'s The clock - this dissertation aims to investigate the impact of modernity on literary representations of the Sabbath. The analysis of these writings will be conducted by comparing them to each other, highlight the differences in modes of representation on a same religious event. The biographies of these authors were extremely relevant to understand their work, since they expressed the ideals of Haskalah in their literary texts, through their reliable narrators. These authors have masterfully included in their production the dichotomized concept of tradition versus modernity in their texts, in order to illuminate the life of the shtetl community from within, and to portray the ways of thought of the simple Jew, while aiming at turning him into a modern man. Aware of their social roles, Abramóvitsh, Rabinovitch and Peretz have used Yiddish language and the culture of the Eastern European Jewish to establish a new era for the Yiddish culture and literature.

Este tese aborda a obra do escritor judeu austríaco Joseph Roth, buscando entender a crítica que ele faz à modernidade como resultante de um ponto de vista singular, determinado pelo encontro entre dois mundos: o mundo do tradicionalismo judaico no Leste europeu e o mundo da monarquia habsburga, em seus anos finais. Pretende-se demonstrar que é tomando como referência os parâmetros destes dois universos que Roth dirige um olhar cético para a modernidade e para o mundo pós-1ª. Guerra Mundial. Ao mesmo tempo, pretende-se demonstrar como o conceito de exílio está inextricavelmente ligado a uma obra crítica com relação a seu tempo, embasada na memória de dois mundos em extinção. Trata-se, porém, de um exílio que se configura mais como a expulsão de um tempo do que como uma simples expulsão geográfica - o que o torna, de certa maneira, mais trágico. O exílio é também uma das categorias centrais da reflexão mística e filosófica judaica, e neste sentido busco apontar para as coincidências entre o tema do exílio em Roth e nas doutrinas desta tradição. Ao conceito de exílio corresponde, como seu duplo e seu oposto, o conceito de Heimat (terra-mãe), que em Roth se torna uma categoria abstrata, pertencente ao universo da metafísica e da memória, e ,como tal, objeto de culto e paradigma, à luz dos quais ele interpreta a realidade do universo europeu entre-guerras. Diante do que foi discutido sobre os temas acima, conclui-se que esta Heimat imaginária afigura-se como uma das suas obsessões literárias, em torno da qual ele construirá uma obra que é, sobretudo, a tentativa de restauração de uma paisagem humana desaparecida e um retrato profundamente nostálgico da memória de uma civilização, ancorada na Idade Média, e sepultada pelo tempo e pelas guerras.<br>This thesis discusses the oeuvre of the Jewish Austrian writer Joseph Roth, and aims at an understanding of his critique of modernity, which is seen as a result of a unique point of view, determined by the encounter between two worlds: the traditional world of Eastern European Jewry on one hand and the world of the final years of the Habsburg Monarchy on the other. I try to show that Roth takes a skeptical look at modernity and at post-World War I Europe using the paradigms of these two lost worlds.At the same time I aim at demonstrating how the concept of exile is deeply rooted in his critique of modernity. However he is dealing with an exile in time here, as opposed to a purely geographical exile - an exile that is far more tragic, since it is irreversible. Exile is also a core theme in traditional Jewish mystical and philosophical thought and I try to point to coincidences in the treatment of this topic in Roth and in traditional Jewish doctrines.The concept of exile has the idea of Heimat or homeland as its opposite, and in Roth Heimat becomes an abstract category, pertaining to the universe of metaphysics and memory, in the light of which he interprets European civilization of the 1920´s and 1930´s.I conclude by showing how this fictive Heimat turns into one of his literary obsessions, around which he will build an oeuvre, which is, more then anything else, an attempt at restoring a vanished human landscape, anchored in the Middle Ages and buried by time and by wars.

The present literary production in France indicates the return of the subject, which has been proclaimed dead since the New Novel. With the proliferation of autobiographical texts in the nineteen-eighties, a generalized movement towards an aesthetic genre valuing this particularity was noticed. This proliferation renders the scope of this literary form immense. It covers a range from strictly historical texts, including autobiographies, memoirs and intimate journals to semi-referential texts, qualified as autobiographical fictions, "autofictions" or again "factual fictions". Midway between the autobiography and the novel, autofiction, this little studied literary practice, inaugurates a new writing form which we believe constitutes one of the boldest modern incarnations of the writing of the self. This thesis considers the possibility of a correlation existing in the problematics of autofiction and those of Jewishness in writing. Already off-centered, the Jewish writer, can be seen as the emblematic figure of the writer himself. Drawing on a corpus of four writers (Serge Doubrovsky, Marcel Benabou, Regine Robin and Patrick Modiano), we examine the structure, as well as its functionning rules, woven through texts sharing Jewish authorship. These writers pose, each from his own specific perspective, the problem of Jewishness in writing. This correlation brings to light the exemplary nature of these texts with regards to the more generalized and thus far unprecedented strategy that is autofiction. The intersection of these historically marked problems, autofiction and Jewishness in writing, leads us inevitably to further reflection upon the tragedy of modernity, the Shoah and its omnipresent shadow in the works of our corpus.

This essay offers a thematic analysis focusing specifically on antisemitic motifs, in Jascha Golowanjuk’s novel Främmande fågel (1944). The Jewish identity of the protagonist is analyzed as a parallel development to his other identity processes, in which his artistry as a violinist is especially emphasized. This analysis is mainly achieved by using Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of the anti-Semitic Jew, as well as Frantz Fanon’s writings about racism. By reason of the insufficient previous research on Jascha Golowanjuk, a brief introduction to the author and his Swedish authorship is provided, along with its reception during the 1930s and 40s. I argue that the protagonist’s development of a Jewish identity is essential to his artistry. Finally, this essay explores the contrast between the discussion of Jewish identity within Golowanjuk´s novels, and the complete disregard the literary establishment had for this very same discussion.

Synopsis :<p><p>La thèse démontre la force du discours de la survivance à travers tant l’essai que le roman, respectivement chez deux auteurs représentatifs et exemplaires. Jean Améry est l’initiateur d’un discours où l’accent est mis sur l’expérience de la privation totale de liberté et sur le suicide comme paroxysme de l’acte libre voulu par le survivant des camps de concentration. Imre Kertész fonde, lui, une écriture synonyme de stratégie de survie. Le suicide y constitue le moyen fictionnel, pour l’être survivant, de regagner sa liberté et son propre « destin ».<p><p><p><p>Résumé :<p><p>La thèse se propose d´analyser l´articulation littéraire du thème de la survivance, thème étudié à travers un corpus déterminé. « Articulation littéraire » est à entendre ici au sens de vecteur d’écriture dans l’acception la plus riche, à savoir depuis la représentation, les procédés littéraires jusqu’au processus lui-même. Le titre original du texte s’articule autour du vocable « Weiterüberleben », lequel opère une synthèse entre les deux facettes « survivre » et « continuer à vivre ».<p><p>A cet égard, le choix du terme « survivance » en français semblait très approprié. Celui-ci s’oppose dans un premier temps au mot usuel de « survie » par l’accent qu’il met sur l’action, la durée, la continuité ainsi que l’irréversibilité de cette expérience. <p>Dans un deuxième temps, dire « survivance » signifie introduire d’emblée un impact philosophique intentionnel qui place le phénomène étudié dans le sillage conceptuel de Derrida – différance, restance, absence, démeurance. A ce titre, la survivance peut être considérée comme trace et hantise au même moment.<p><p>Dès lors, le mouvement exprimé dans le titre sert de matrice ;dans le « discours sur la survivance », la survie n’est plus la condition d’écriture mais le véritable objet et, si l’on veut, l’objectif de cette écriture. Ce discours articule a) une reconquête de la dignité et liberté qui contient la possibilité du suicide, b) le vœu de continuer à faire vivre la mémoire à la Shoah et aux survivants et c) l’écriture comme stratégie de survie et résistance contre l’oubli.<p>Le centre de gravité de ce travail est l’étude du rapport entre l´expérience des survivants des camps de concentration et l’écriture de celle-ci. Il s´agit dès lors de se pencher sur les formes d´écriture qui traitent de cette problématique. Le témoignage, d´abord :quel est son rôle en tant que mise en parole d’une expérience ?A côté du témoignage, on observe l´émergence du traitement fictionnel de la thématique.<p><p>Une interrogation sur les modes d´émergence littéraire de ce sujet nécessite le passage par une historiographie parcourant les principales tentatives antérieures de représentation. Le témoignage a d´ores et déjà offert des possibilités intéressantes en tant que vecteur de représentation mais a également révélé ses limites. La fiction a montré quelle portée elle peut avoir ;si elle permet entre autres une ouverture du discours, elle se heurte aussi à des obstacles tels que les problèmes de la factualité, de la vérité, de l´authenticité. <p><p>Tout en puisant chez bon nombre d´autres écrivains, la thèse se base sur un corpus de deux auteurs emblématiques pour ce qu´ils ont apporté dans le domaine concerné :Jean Améry et Imre Kertész.<p><p>Le choix de Jean Améry se justifie notamment par le fait qu’il est l’initiateur d´un discours de la survivance où l´accent est mis sur l´expérience de la privation totale de liberté et sur le suicide comme paroxysme de l´acte libre voulu par le survivant. Kertesz, prix Nobel 2002, apparaît comme l’héritier d´Améry mais, dans une sorte de retournement, transforme le discours négatif de celui-ci en un discours positif par une analyse en termes de dialogicité et d´intertextualité. <p><p>Notre point de départ dans l’œuvre d’Améry est son essai sur la torture (« Par-delà le crime et le châtiment », 1966). C’est là qu’il insiste sur l’irréversibilité du moment subjectif qu’est la torture (« Celui qui a été torturé reste torturé ») ;Améry construit à cet endroit le fondement de la « perspective de la victime » et pose, dans le voisinage immédiat, la question de savoir comment surmonter l’insurmontable. <p><p>Avec le concept de « contre-violence », Améry explore le paradoxe de la libération – ou la « réversibilité de l’irréversible » – à travers les crises existentielles de son protagoniste (et alter ego) Lefeu (artiste-survivant); son roman-essai « Lefeu ou la démolition » donne lieu à l’analyse de ce phénomène paradoxal, cher à l’auteur.<p><p>L´exposé des quatre concepts fondamentaux d´Améry, également fondateurs de tout discours sur l´Holocauste – la perte de la confiance existentielle, le ressentiment, l´exil et la judéité – prépare la voie à une analyse détaillée du discours sur le suicide déployé dans « Porter la main sur soi ». En franchissant les frontières de la psychologie et les limites de la langue, Améry procède à une phénoménologie du suicide qui souligne la liberté individuelle mais qui écarte en même temps l´individu de la société.<p><p>Imre Kertész, dont l´œuvre marque le passage vers la fiction par sa trilogie « Etre sans destin », « Le refus », « Kaddish pour l´enfant qui ne naîtra pas », place l´individu dans toute sa fragilité face à l´Histoire nazie et communiste en faisant de celui-ci un survivant « sans destin », c´est-à-dire sans existence personnelle. Regagner son propre destin devient la modalité de la survivance. <p>Une analyse détaillée de son essai « L’Holocauste comme culture » inscrit d’emblée Imre Kertész dans la filiation de Jean Améry. Cet essai peut être lu comme un manifeste éthico-esthétique ;il insiste sur la nécessité de transposer l’expérience vécue dans l’espace littéraire. A cette condition seulement, le survivant réussit à survivre grâce et à travers les œuvres qu’il crée. Il y réussit en effet à figurer la « catharsis » ou à transfigurer la matière brute du vécu pour pouvoir continuer à survivre. <p><p>Tout en refusant catégoriquement le suicide pour des raisons éthiques, Kertész met paradoxalement en scène au cœur de Liquidation le suicide d´un écrivain né à Auschwitz. Il pose ainsi la question de « ce qui reste » de l’expérience de la survie après la disparition des survivants et, donc, au-delà de la possibilité d’en témoigner.<p><p>L’analyse monographique de ces deux auteurs permet, d’une part, de démontrer la relation référentielle qui lie Kertész à Améry, d’autre part, d’étudier la problématique à travers deux générations, deux appartenances historiques et deux univers culturels différents. Elle débouche ainsi sur une histoire interculturelle et transgénérationelle de la survivance à l’époque des totalitarismes.<p><br>Doctorat en Langues et lettres<br>info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

In the aftermath of the Shoah (Holocaust)—the mass murder of 6,000,000 Jews—Jean-Paul Sartre wrote Reflexions sur la Question Juive (1946), in which he concluded that the fate of the Jews, the fate of the individual non-Jew, and the fate of the entire world are inextricably and reciprocally intertwined. Building on Sartre's perception, Portrait of a Jew (1962) and The Liberation of the Jew (1966) describe what the author, Albert Memmi, terms "the universal Jewish fate": that of being the paradigmatic "colonized" Other—insofar as the Jews are a particularly oppressed minority, that is, their marginalization epitomizes the fate of all humanity. Further, Memmi argues both that "to be a Jewish writer is ... to express the Jewish fate" and that a "true Jewish literature" is necessarily one which revolts against the imposition and acceptance of this fate. Sartre's and Memmi's insights posit that Jewish consciousness acts upon both national and world consciousness. Memmi suggests that one means of expressing the Jewish consciousness is through literature. In their imaginative interpretations of the post-Shoah interconnections between the Jew, the nation, and the world, modern Jewish fiction writers of the Diaspora (dispersion) —at least those whose work foregrounds tropes of Jewish sensibility, incorporating Jewish characters and themes—often delineate a world which, in the aftermath of Auschwitz, is socially and existentially even more precarious than it was before the war. This study examines post-Shoah Jewish consciousness and its relation to national/world consciousness,as represented in the English-language Jewish fiction of Australia, South Africa, and Canada, Commonwealth countries whose diverse Jewish literatures have been overshadowed by the predominant English-language Jewish literary culture of the U.S.A. The structure of this study is bipartite. Part B is an indexed Bibliography enumerating primary works by Jewish prose fiction writers of Australia, Canada, and South Africa. Part A is a critical commentary on Part B. The Introduction (Chapter 1) outlines the theoretical bases for the study. The three following chapters scrutinize Jewish Australian (Chapter 2), Jewish South African (Chapter 3), and Jewish Canadian (Chapter 4) fiction. Among the writers considered are Australians B.N. Jubal, Judah Waten, David Martin, Morris Lurie, Serge Liberman, and Lily Brett; South Africans Nadine Gordimer, Dan Jacobson, Jillian Becker, Antony Sher, and Rose Zwi; and Canadians Henry Kreisel, A.M. Klein, Adele Wiseman, Mordecai Richler, and Robert Majzels. Each of these three chapters follows a similar format: a description of the origin, history, and demography of the Jewish community; an outline of the important pre-World War II Jewish fiction writers and their work; an examination of representative post-Shoah works; and concluding remarks about the ways in which the works under consideration here contest and revise both the canons of nation and national literature and the very concepts of nation, canon, and canon-making. An Epilogue (Chapter 5) contextualizes the thematic patterns common to the Jewish fiction of the three countries and suggests ways in which this fiction can be located within the larger framework of Jewish Literature.

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2005.<br>Advisor: Dr. Birgit Maier-Katkin, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Modern Languages and Linguistics. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 8, 2005). Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 50 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

This doctoral dissertation discusses the issue of religiosity in the context of American-Jewish literature, emphasizing the significance of Judaism as an indispensable element in the formation of American Jewish female identity. The dissertation consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 is devoted to a discussion of the emigration of Jewish women from Central and Eastern Europe to America in the first half of the twentieth century, the situation of women in the particular branches of contemporary American Judaism, and the influence of feminism on the current status of women in Judaism. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the chronological and thematic developments in American Jewish women’s writing in the United States in the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Chapter 3 contains a critical comprehensive analysis of selected fiction by contemporary American Jewish women writers, representatives of the third generation, whose works were published between 1980-2005. The narratives selected for the analysis in Chapter 3 have been examined not only from the socio-cultural perspective related to the Judaic religion and the place of women in the changing world, but also in terms of the form and style chosen by their authors.<br>Przygotowana rozprawa doktorska podejmuje problem religijności w kontekście literatury amerykańsko-żydowskiej, nakreślając znaczenie judaizmu jako niezbędnego elementu w kształtowaniu się amerykańsko-żydowskiej tożsamości kobiet. Praca składa się z trzech rozdziałów. Rozdział pierwszy poświęcony został emigracji kobiet żydowskich wywodzących się na ogół z Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej do Ameryki, pozycji kobiet w judaizmie oraz wpływowi feminizmu żydowskiego na kształt współczesnych odłamów judaizmu. W drugim rozdziale pracy dokonano przeglądu kobiecej literatury amerykańsko-żydowskiej na przestrzeni XX i początku XXI wieku. Trzeci rozdział, stanowiący część empiryczną rozprawy, zawiera krytyczną interpretację wybranych dzieł literackich pochodzących z okresu 1980-2005 autorstwa współczesnych pisarek amerykańsko-żydowskich reprezentujących trzecie pokolenie. Utwory te przeanalizowano zarówno z perspektywy społeczno-kulturowej, związanej bezpośrednio z religią judaistyczną i miejscem kobiet w zmieniającym się świecie, jak i pod kątem formy i stylu preferowanych przez ich autorki.<br>Uniwersytet w Białymstoku. Wydział Filologiczny

The present project draws a comparison between the literature and thought of Hasidic Rabbi Nachman of Braslav (1772–1810) and Argentine writer and public intellectual Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986). It is organized around two components of their writing—a discursive self-positioning at “the edge” of tradition and a “cabbalistic” stylization of their narratives. The dissertation contextualizes these components within late eighteenth century Enlightenment ideology and emancipation policies, and mid-twentieth century political ideologies of Nazism and Fascism, respectively. The dissertation is bookended by a close comparative reading of their stories. It finds that each in his moment is greatly implicated in questions of resituating Jews and Judaism within broader society, and argues that the effort to aesthetically represent the changing social location of Jews is linked to their understanding of their respective literary projects more broadly. Finally, the study illuminates their shared conceptualization of modern Judaism as a literary model. The dissertation’s broader intervention in the filed of early modern and modern literature relates to the dynamic of rupture and continuity that is so central to categorizations of modern writing. It demonstrates that the fault lines of the rupture from tradition, vis-à-vis which modern literature has been constructed, was already present—poetically and discursively—in the “tradition” from which it purportedly departs. By combining the study of diverse geographies, histories, languages, cultures and genres, the present study articulates a comparative frame that challenges conventional categorizations of modern writing.

This dissertation explores the history of the translation of world literature into Yiddish through a series of interconnected case studies, stretching from the “founding” decade of modern Yiddish literature through its interwar acme. It features diachronic studies of single translator-authors (Sh. Y. Abramovitsh; Der Nister; Isaac Bashevis Singer) which consider the relationship between translations and original writing; synchronic views of transformative moments in Yiddish literary (translational) history across its multiple centers (1903; 1910; New York, Warsaw, Moscow); and “distant” readings of periodicals and anthologies with an eye to their particular explicit and implicit translation theories and practices as well as to the role of editors and publishers (Sholem Aleichem; Avrom Reyzen) in shaping both real and imagined literary markets. Throughout, it mobilizes the chronically-neglected genre of homegrown Yiddish literary criticism and theory (I.L. Peretz, Chaim Zhitlowsky, Moyshe Litvakov) in the hopes of understanding the shifting stakes and meanings of translation on the terms of translators, authors, critics, and readers themselves. By attending to the ways in which translations functioned as both sources of livelihood and engines of literary growth, this dissertation examines the desired and intermittently realized modernization and “normalization” of Yiddish literature on the world stage.