1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910787539003321

Autore

Levi Neil Jonathan <1967->

Titolo

Modernist form and the myth of Jewification [[electronic resource] /] / Neil Levi

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, : Fordham University Press, 2014

ISBN

0-8232-5508-5

0-8232-6086-0

0-8232-5509-3

0-8232-5507-7

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (414 p.)

Classificazione

REL040030LIT004170PHI001000

Disciplina

700/.4112

Soggetti

Modernism (Art)

Art criticism

Antisemitism

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Machine generated contents note: -- 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 CeĢline -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

Sommario/riassunto

"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"--