Modernist form and the myth of Jewification / Neil Levi.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Levi, Neil Jonathan, 1967-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Modernism (Art).

Art criticism.

Antisemitism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (414 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2014.

Language Note:

English

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"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

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 Celine

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780823255085

0823255085

9780823260867

0823260860

9780823255092

0823255093

9780823255078

0823255077

OCLC:

867740219