Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification / / Neil Levi.

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 No...

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Superior document:Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package Pre-2014
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Place / Publishing House:New York, NY : : Fordham University Press, , [2013]
©2013
Year of Publication:2013
Language:English
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Physical Description:1 online resource (272 p.)
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Other title:Frontmatter --
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 Céline --
Notes --
Bibliography --
Index
Summary: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.
Format:Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
ISBN:9780823255085
9783111189604
9783110707298
DOI:10.1515/9780823255085
Access:restricted access
Hierarchical level:Monograph
Statement of Responsibility: Neil Levi.