Download or read book Jacob Menahem and Mimoun written by Marcel Benabou and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2001-09-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1998 National Jewish Book Award Winner for Autobiography/Memoir "A dry wit and surprising pathos infuse this "family epic," which turns out to be "merely" the telling of Benabou's failed attempt at creating his literary masterpiece. . . The reader shares his initial hopefulness as he details his younger self's ambitious plans for a family epic, founded in memory, supplemented by ever-growing mountains of scholarly documentation . . . and formally grounded in a literary model of the past that, ultimately, eludes him. In telling the stories of his three selected ancestors, Jacob, Menahem, and Mimoun, Benabou notices that his youthful project has not disappeared. He's decided to let his book tell itself; he'll merely hitch himself to the story and go along for the ride in this artistic tour-de force, by turns playful and serious."--Kirkus Reviews Jacob, Menahem, and Mimoun delves into Marcel Bénabou's uncommon family history while reflecting on the mysteries of memory, the past, and writing. Born in Morocco in 1939 to a Jewish family, Bénabou left his home at age seventeen to study ancient history in Paris. Bénabou's memoir returns to his childhood in Morocco--to his parents, their home, and the Jewish community in Meknes. At the same time he accounts for all that has changed, including his very different life in Paris and the disappearance of the world of his childhood. He notes how he has turned from his family's wish that he become a rabbi to his absorption, as an adult, in several millennia of secular literature. And he worries about how his "family epic"--an epic meant to include the history of Morocco's Jews--has become a book about himself and his inability to write the great book he has long imagined--the book one owes oneself and the world. The impossibility of fully recovering the past hovers over his memories. And the impossibility of writing a book about that past is also there--an impossibility that Bénabou acknowledges, delineates, and, in a real if also provisional sense, transcends. In his inspired attention to that impossibility, Bénabou has written a book that transforms absence into presence and the past into rich matter for the present. Marcel Bénabou lives in Paris and pursues his current positions as professor at the University of Paris and as the permanent provisional secretary of Oulipo, that unsettling association of indefatigably innovative writers. Steven Rendall is a professor in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Distinguo: Reading Montaigne Differently and the translator of many books including Jürgen Habermas's Berlin Republic (Nebraska 1997). Warren Motte is a professor of French at the University of Colorado. He is the author of several books including Playtexts: Ludics in Contemporay Literature (Nebraska 1995).
Download or read book In Lieu of Memory written by Thomas Nolden and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-23 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a wide-ranging analysis of French Jewish authors born after the Shoah and traces the development of the rich agenda of jeune littérature juive (young Jewish writing) from its beginnings in the late 1970s, into the 1980s and 1990s, when it gained intense momentum. Thomas Nolden uses a wealth of biographical information to expound on his central thesis: the abrupt interruption of transmission of the Jewish heritage by assimilation, migration, and near-extermination required these writers to reinvent themselves, their past, and their memories as Jews. Nolden provides concise readings of the fiction of more than two dozen writers of both Sephardic and Ashkenazi background living in present-day France. He demonstrates how contemporary Jewish writing has responded historically, culturally, politically, and aesthetically to developments in French society and in Jewish culture. His critical analysis of the major themes, concerns, and stylistic features of the authors' work connects Jewish writing in France to the traditions of Jewish writing both during the Diaspora and in Israel.
Download or read book How to Do Things with Forms written by Chris Andrews and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2022-09-15 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature) is a literary think tank that brings together writers and mathematicians. Since 1960, its worldwide influence has refreshed ways of making and thinking about literature. How to Do Things with Forms assesses the work of the group, explores where it came from, and envisages its future. Redefining the Oulipo’s key concept of the constraint in a clear and rigorous way, Chris Andrews weighs the roles of craft and imitation in the group’s practice. He highlights the importance of translation for the Oulipo’s writers, explaining how their new forms convey meanings and how these famously playful authors are also moved by serious concerns. Offering fresh interpretations of emblematic Oulipian works such as Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, Andrews also examines lesser-known texts by Jacques Roubaud, Anne F. Garréta, and Michelle Grangaud. How to Do Things with Forms addresses questions of interest to anyone involved in the making of literature, illuminating how writers decide when to stop revising, the risks and benefits of a project mentality in creative writing, and ways of holding a reader’s interest for as long as possible.
Download or read book American Jewish Year Book 1997 written by David Singer and published by VNR AG. This book was released on 1997 with total page 750 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Library owns the volumes of the American Jewish Yearbook from 1899 - current.
Download or read book Give the Word Responses to Werner Hamacher s 95 Theses on Philology written by Werner Hamacher and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2019-06-19 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Werner Hamacher’s witty and elliptical 95 Theses on Philology challenges the humanities—and particularly academic philology—that assume language to be a given entity rather than an event. In Give the Word eleven scholars of literature and philosophy (Susan Bernstein, Michèle Cohen-Halimi, Peter Fenves, Sean Gurd, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Jan Plug, Gerhard Richter, Avital Ronell, Thomas Schestag, Ann Smock, and Vincent van Gerven Oei) take up the challenge presented by Hamacher’s theses. At the close Hamacher responds to them in a spirited text that elaborates on the context of his 95 Theses and its rich theoretical and philosophical ramifications. The 95 Theses, included in this volume, makes this collection a rich resource for the study and practice of “radical philology.” Hamacher’s philology interrupts and transforms, parting with tradition precisely in order to remain faithful to its radical but increasingly occluded core. The contributors test Hamacher’s break with philology in a variety of ways, attempting a philological practice that does not take language as an object of knowledge, study, or even love. Thus, in responding to Hamacher’s Theses, the authors approach language that, because it can never be an object of any kind, awakens an unfamiliar desire. Taken together these essays problematize philological ontology in a movement toward radical reconceptualizations of labor, action, and historical time.
Download or read book Life as Creative Constraint written by Anna Kemp and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life as Creative Constraint is the first book to focus on the extraordinary life-writing of the French experimental writing group, the Oulipo. The Oulipo's enthusiasm for literary games and formal gymnastics has seen its work caricatured as 'lifeless' - impressively virtuoso but more interested in form than content and ultimately disengaged from the world. This book examines a broad corpus of work by Georges Perec, Marcel Bénabou, Jacques Roubaud and Anne F. Garréta to show that, despite the group's early devotion to the radical impersonality of mathematics, later generations of oulipians have brought the group's fascination with systems, games and constraints to bear on autobiography. Far from being 'lifeless', oulipian constraints and concepts provide the tools that allow writers to engage critically and creatively with lived experience, and mine the potential of the autobiographical genre. The games played by these writers are not simply pastimes or cunning writing techniques, but modes of survival, self-examination, self-invention, and relating to the world and to others. As the title of Georges Perec's masterpiece suggests, they are a mode d'emploi for life.
Download or read book Dump this Book While You Still Can written by Marcel Bänabou and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The narrator discovers a strange book on his desk. He opens the book and it tells him to stop reading and throw it away.
Download or read book Contemporary Jewish Writing in Europe written by Vivian Liska and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2007-12-05 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With contributions from a dozen American and European scholars, this volume presents an overview of Jewish writing in post--World War II Europe. Striking a balance between close readings of individual texts and general surveys of larger movements and underlying themes, the essays portray Jewish authors across Europe as writers and intellectuals of multiple affiliations and hybrid identities. Aimed at a general readership and guided by the idea of constructing bridges across national cultures, this book maps for English-speaking readers the productivity and diversity of Jewish writers and writing that has marked a revitalization of Jewish culture in France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, and Russia.
Download or read book Loiterature written by Ross Chambers and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fabric of the western literary tradition is not always predictable. In one wayward strand, waywardness itself is at work, delay becomes almost predictable, triviality is auspicious, and failure is cheerfully admired. This is loiterature. Loiterature is the first book to identify this strand, to follow its path through major works and genres, and to evaluate its literary significance. ø By offering subtle resistance to the laws of "good social order," loiterly literature blurs the distinctions between innocent pleasure and harmless relaxation on the one hand, and not-so-innocent intent on the other. The result is covert social criticism that casts doubt on the values good citizens hold dear?values like discipline, organization, productivity, and, above all, work. It levels this criticism, however, under the guise of innocent wit or harmless entertainment. Loiterature distracts attention the way a street conjurer diverts us with his sleight of hand.øøø If the pleasurable has critical potential, may not one of the functions of the critical be to produce pleasure? The ability to digress, Ross Chambers suggests, is at the heart of both, and loiterature?s digressive waywardness offers something to ponder for critics of culture as well as lovers of literature.
Download or read book Quotology written by Willis Goth Regier and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Erasmus advised readers to learn quotations by heart and copy them everywhere: write them in the front and back of books; inscribe them on rings and cups; paint them on doors and walls, ?even on the glass of a window.? Emerson noted that ?in Europe, every church is a kind of book or bible, so covered is it with inscriptions and pictures.? In Arabic script as tall as a man, the Koran is quoted on the walls and domes of mosques. ø We quote to admire, provoke, commemorate, dispute, play, and inspire. Quotations signal class, club, clique, and alma mater. They animate wit, relay prophecies, guide meditation, and accessorize fashion. ø In Quotology Willis Goth Regier draws on world literature and contemporary events to show how vital quotations are, how they are collected and organized, and how deceptive they can be. He probes all these aspects, identifying fifty-nine types of quotations, including misquotations and anonymous sayings. Following the logic of quotology, Quotology concludes with famous last words.
Download or read book Articulating Resistance under the Roman Empire written by Daniel Jolowicz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-05 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the many strategies by which elite Greeks and Romans resisted the cultural and political hegemony of the Roman Empire in ways that avoided direct confrontation or simple warfare. By resistance is meant a range of responses including 'opposition', 'subversion', 'antagonism', 'dissent', and 'criticism' within a multiplicity of cultural forms from identity-assertion to polemic. Although largely focused on literary culture, its implications can be extended to the world of visual and material culture. Within the volume a distinguished group of scholars explores topics such as the affirmation of identity via language choice in epigraphy; the use of genre (dialogue, declamation, biography, the novel) to express resistant positions; identity negotiation in the scintillating and often satirical Greek essays of Lucian; and the place of religion in resisting hegemonic power.
Download or read book The Europa Directory of Literary Awards and Prizes written by Europa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Speaking of Crime written by Patricia E. O'Connor and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Speaking of Crime explores how inmates speak of their lives and in particular how they speak of crime. What is the power of speech for prisoners? What do their uses of pronouns and choices of verbs reveal about them, their experiences of violence, their relationships with other prisoners, and their likelihood for change? In this fascinating book, Patricia E. O'Connor probes beneath the surface of prison speech by examining over one hundred taped accounts of narratives of violence made by African-American inmates of a U.S. maximum security prison. The inmates' manner of speaking about their lives and acts of violence?not just what they talk about but how they talk about it?supplies important clues to their senses of identity and feelings of agency. The use of second-person pronouns when speaking about themselves and a reliance on distinctive verbal devices such as irony and constructed dialogue provide important insights into the way prisoners see their world and help condition how they interact with it.
Download or read book Fascism s Return written by Richard Joseph Golsan and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past fifteen years have witnessed the renewed presence of fascism in European political and cultural life. In addition, there have been scandals surrounding the fascist pasts of numerous renowned intellectuals, including Martin Heidegger, Paul de Man, and Maurice Blanchot. In Fascism’s Return, eleven leading American and European scholars examine the resurgence of fascism from many angles, providing an essential and timely view of this troubling moment in European political, cultural, and intellectual history. Intellectual and public scandals surrounding the fascist past—including the highly publicized Barbie and Touvier trials in France—are addressed. Other writers focus on controversial efforts to revise the historical representation of fascism in Germany and France. The reemergence of the “new” fascist movements and ideologies in various European nations is also examined. A final essay considers the controversial U. S. support during the 1980s of Central American dictatorships. As editor Richard J. Golsan notes, the essays in this volume “illustrate a multitude of ways in which fascism continues to make its presence felt in western democratic societies, erupting with disturbing frequency as a ‘return of the repressed’ in judicial and artistic scandals as well as in historical, critical, and political debates.”
Download or read book Many Subtle Channels written by Daniel Levin Becker and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-08 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Main description: What sort of society could bind together Jacques Roubaud, Italo Calvino, Marcel Duchamp, and Raymond Queneau-and Daniel Levin Becker, a young American obsessed with language play? Only the Oulipo, the Paris-based experimental collective founded in 1960 and fated to become one of literature's quirkiest movements. An international organization of writers, artists, and scientists who embrace formal and procedural constraints to achieve literature's possibilities, the Oulipo (the French acronym stands for 0workshop for potential literature0) is perhaps best known as the cradle of Georges Perec's novel A Void, which does not contain the letter e. Drawn to the Oulipo's mystique, Levin Becker secured a Fulbright grant to study the organization and traveled to Paris. He was eventually offered membership, becoming only the second American to be admitted to the group. From the perspective of a young initiate, the Oulipians and their projects are at once bizarre and utterly compelling. Levin Becker's love for games, puzzles, and language play is infectious, calling to mind Elif Batuman's delight in Russian literature in The Possessed. In recent years, the Oulipo has inspired the creation of numerous other collectives: the OuMuPo (a collective of DJs), the OuMaPo (marionette players), the OuBaPo (comic strip artists), the OuFlarfPo (poets who generate poetry with the aid of search engines), and a menagerie of other Ou-X-Pos (workshops for potential something). Levin Becker discusses these and other intriguing developments in this history and personal appreciation of an iconic-and iconoclastic-group.
Download or read book In Praise of Flattery written by Willis Goth Regier and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where would we be without flattery? Hobbes deemed it an honorable duty and Meredith called it the ?finest of the arts.? Alexander the Great applied it as imperial policy; Caesar and Cleopatra were masters of it; and Napoleon devoured it like candy. But flattery also has influential enemies. Cicero called flattery ?the handmaid of vice? and Tacitus compared it to poison.ø ø In a work as erudite as it is entertaining, Willis Goth Regier looks into flattery as an element as flammable (and as taken for granted) as oxygen. Giving flattery light, attention, and care, Regier treats readers to hundreds of historical examples drawn from the highest social circles in politics, romance, and religion, from the courts of Byzantium and China to Paris, Rome, and Washington, DC. ø Because flattery must please, it is playful and creative, and Regier?s book makes the most of it, moving with light steps, now and then pausing to take in the view. Ambitious flatterers even seek to flatter God, a practice Regier treats with trepidation. This is a book for those who would understand the history, tactics, and pleasures of flattery, not least the thrill of danger. ø ?O, flatter me, for love delights in praises.??Shakespeare ø ?The whole World and the Bus?ness of it, is Manag?d by Flattery and Paradox; the one sets up False Gods, and the other maintains them.??Sir Roger L?Estrange ø ?Just praise is only a debt, but flattery is a present.??Samuel Johnson ø ?In this disorganized society, in which the passions of the people are the sole real force, authority belongs to the party that understands how to flatter.??Hippolyte Taine
Download or read book The Other Book written by Jordan Stump and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the relationship between a text and its "other" forms--translation, manuscript, critical edition, copy--and what can be gleaned from this textual interplay.
