Being for myself alone : origins of Jewish autobiography / Marcus Moseley.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Moseley, Marcus.

Series:

Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Autobiography.

Autobiography--Jewish authors.

Jewish authors--Biography--History and criticism.

Jewish authors.

Jewish literature--20th century--History and criticism.

Jewish literature.

Self in literature.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xiii, 650 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2006.

Summary:

This is a work of unprecedented scope that traces the origins of Jewish autobiographical writing from the early-modern period to the early twentieth century.

Contents:

1 Autobiography: The Elusive Subject 1

Generic Dilemmas 1

Rousseau's Confessions as Autobiographical Paradigm 5

The "Children of Jean Jacques" in Jewish Eastern Europe 13

In and Around the Self: The Critical Discourse 17

2 Intertextual Relations: Jewish Autobiographical Encounters 37

Autobiography as "Text"/Autobiography as "Discourse" 37

Symptoms of Transition: The Crystallization of Autobiographical Discourse 42

Cross-Cultural Fashionings of the Self 46

Arrested Development: The Constitution of a Jewish Autobiographical Field 50

3 Autobiography as Reading 67

The "Tradition Model for the Study of Jewish Autobiography 67

Sephardic Origins I Valley and Vision: Abraham Yagel's Gei' hizzayon 82

Sephardic Origins II "Un coup de des n'abolira jamais le hasard": Yehudah Aryeh Modena's Hayyei yehudah 103

Ashkenazic Origins I Scrolls of Lamentation and Lament 147

Ashkenazic Origins II The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln 155

The Function of the First Person in Pre-Modern Jewish Narrative: An Overview 175

4 Pre-Modern Jewish Autobiography and the Radical Hermeneutics of Michah Yosef Berdichevsky 194

Worlds Within Worlds 194

The Voice of the Individual and the Burden of Inheritance: Berdichevsky's Autobiographical Counter-Tradition 212

The Crystallization of an Autobiographical Hermeneutic 219

Michah Yosef Berdichevsky Before the Speculum of Bin Gorion: The Collected Works as Encylopaedia 262

From Re-Collection to Recollection: The Great Memory of Bin Gorion 268

Miriam: The Summing Up 276

5 Jewish Autobiographical Writing at the Time of Rousseau 286

Synchronicities 286

Jacob Emden's Megillat sefer 288

Nathan of Nemirov's Yemei maharnat 312

6 Domesticating Rousseau: Mordechai Aaron Guenzberg's 'Avi'ezer 333

"I am not the father of this book, rather its mother, for in pain did I bear it" 333

The Conception of the Child 344

Generation and Gender: Discourses on Power 353

Autobiographies in Dialogue: From 'Avi'ezer to Hatt'ot ne'urim 368

7 Ramifications Of The Self: Cultural Landscapes of Jewish Autobiography 377

Autobiography against Autobiography: Traditionalist Versions of the Self 377

Semiotics of Autobiographical Behaviour 412

Buried Autobiographies 422

Summons to Autobiography/Response 438

Matrices of the Jewish Autobiographical Self 445

"Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future,/And time future contained in time past." 461.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 599-624) and index.

ISBN:

0804751579

OCLC:

56198828