Download or read book The Schlemiel as Metaphor written by Sanford Pinsker and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The certainty that deep down we are all schlemiels is perhaps what makes America love an inept ball team or a Woody Allen who unburdens his neurotic heart in public. In this unique, revised history of the schlemiel, Sanford Pinsker uses psychological, linguistic, and anecdotal approaches, as well as his considerable skills as a spritely storyteller, to trace the schlemiel from his beginnings in the Old Testament through his appearance in the nineteenth-century literature of Mendele Mocher Seforim and Sholom Aleichem to his final development as the beautiful loser in the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Woody Allen. Horatio Alger might have once been a good emblem of the American sensibility, but today Woody Allen's anxious, bespectacled punin (face) seems closer, and truer, to our national experience. His urban, end-of-the-century anxieties mirror--albeit in exaggeration--our own. This expanded study of the schlemiel is especially relevant now, when scholarship of Yiddish and American Jewish literature is on the increase. By sketching the family tree of that durable anti-hero the schlemiel, Pinsker proves that Jewish humor is built upon the very foundations of the Jewish experience. Pinsker shows the evolution of the schlemiel from the comic butt of Yiddish jokes to a literary figure that speaks to the heart of our modern problems, and he demonstrates the way that Yiddish humor provides a sorely needed correction, a way of pulling down the vanities we all live by.
Download or read book Jewish Literatures and Cultures written by Anita Norich and published by Society of Biblical Lit. This book was released on 2008 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish literatures and cultures : context and intertext / Anita Norich -- From continuity to contiguity : thoughts on the theory of Jewish literature / Dan Miron -- Beyond influence : toward a new historiographic paradigm / Michael L. Satlow -- Hellenistic Judaism : myth or reality? / Gabriele Boccaccini -- "He was renowned to the ends of the earth" (1 Maccabees 3:9) : Judaism and Hellenism in 1 Maccabees / Martha Himmelfarb -- Roman statues, rabbis, and Greco-Roman culture / Yaron Z. Eliav -- The ghetto and Jewish cultural formation in early modern Europe : towards a new interpretation / David Ruderman -- Hybrid with what? : the variable contexts of Polish Jewish culture : their implications for Jewish cultural history and Jewish studies / Moshe Rosman -- Idols of the cave and theater : a verbal or visual Judaism? / Kalman P. Bland -- "Reverse marranism," translatability, and practice of secular Jewish culture in Russian / Gabriella Safran -- Intertextuality, Rabbinic literature, and the making of Hebrew modernism / Shachar Pinsker -- Brooklyn am Rhein? : the German sources of Jewish-American literature / Julian Levinson -- Diaspora and translation : the migrations of Jewish meaning / Naomi Seidman.
Download or read book Choosing Hope written by David Arnow and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2022-03 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout our history, Jews have traditionally responded to our trials with hope, psychologist David Arnow says, because we have had ready access to Judaism’s abundant reservoir of hope. The first book to plumb the depths of this reservoir, Choosing Hope journeys from biblical times to our day to explore nine fundamental sources of hope in Judaism: Teshuvah—the method to fulfill our hope to become better human beings Tikkun Olam—the hope that we can repair the world by working together Abraham and Sarah—models of persisting in hope amid trials Exodus—the archetype of redemptive hope Covenant—the hope for a durable relationship with the One of Being Job—the “hard-fought hope” that brings a grief-stricken man back to life World to Come—the sustaining hope that death is not the end Israel—high hope activists work to build a just and inclusive society for all Israelis Jewish Humor—“hope’s last weapon” in our darkest days Grounded in a contemporary theology that situates the responsibility for creating a better world in human hands, with God acting through us, Choosing Hope can help us both affirm hope in times of trial and transmit our deepest hopes to the next generation.
Download or read book Strategies of Humor in Post Unification German Literature Film and Other Media written by Jill Twark and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2011-01-18 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fourteen chapters in this anthology feature original analyses of contemporary German-language literary texts, films, political cartoons, cabaret, and other types of performance. The artworks display a wide spectrum of humor modes, such as irony, satire, the grotesque, Jewish humor, and slapstick, as responses to unification with the accompanying euphoria, but also alienation and dislocation. Kerstin Hensel’s Lärchenau, Christoph Hein’s Landnahme, and vignette collections by Jakob Hein (Antrag auf ständige Ausreise und andere Mythen der DDR) and Wladimir Kaminer (Es gab keinen Sex im Sozialismus) are interpreted as examples of the grotesque. The popular films Lola rennt, Sonnenallee, Herr Lehmann, NVA, Alles auf Zucker!, and Mein Führer—Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler are reexamined through the lens of traditional and more recent humor or comic book theories. The contributors focus on how each artwork enriches four prominent postwall German cultural trends: post-unification identity reconstruction, Vergangenheitsbewältigung (including Hitler humor), New German Popular Literature (Christian Kracht’s ironic subtexts), and immigrant perspectives (a “third voice” in the East-West binary reflected here pointedly in Eulenspiegel cartoons). To date, no other scholarly work provides as comprehensive an overview of the diverse strategies of humor used in the past two decades in German-speaking countries.
Download or read book Cross Cultural Reckonings written by Blanche H. Gelfant and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-01-27 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blanche H. Gelfant's book Cross-Cultural Reckonings both demonstrates and questions the applicability of postmodern cultural and literary theories to realistic texts - to fiction and autobiographies valued for their truth. Drawing together an unusual combination of Russian, American, and Canadian writers, the various essays of this book provide new and original perspectives upon the puzzling issues of national identity, of historical change and continuity, of gender and the integrity of literary genres, the boundaries between text and context, and the underlying if overlooked conflicts between the postmodern critic's skepticism and a writer's belief in the transcendence of art and truth. To avoid the contingencies inherent in binary comparisons, the essays in this book seek a triadic form analogous to the triptych or polyptych of the visual arts. Multi-faceted, non-linear, and open-ended, such a form might allow the academic essay to recover a waywardness that traces back to Montaigne, cited in prefactory notes, and to the etymological meaning of the essay as an exagium or weighing, as an act of reckoning. A study at once elegant, erudite, and personal, Cross-Cultural Reckonings reckons with writers of different backgrounds and reputation in whom Gelfant discovers surprising affinities - among them the Russian writers Lydia Chukovskaya, Natalya Baranskaya, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn; Ethel Wilson, a highly reputed Canadian writer; the famous cross-cultural figure, Emma Goldman; and established as well as new or rediscovered American writers, such as Willa Cather, Saul Bellow, Arlene Heyman, and Meridel Le Sueur. These writers are discussed singly and in comparative essays, each of whichis discrete and self-contained, while all interconnect and reflect upon each other as exemplary demonstrations of cross-cultural literary criticism and the deferred final judgment that results from a weighing and reweighing of books.
Download or read book Conversations with Bernard Malamud written by Bernard Malamud and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1991 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bernard Malamud gave his first interview in 1958, his last in 1986. During the intervening twenty-eight years he was formally interviewed at least forty times. This book collects twenty-eight of the best interviews, ranging from brief conversations with journalists to more extended and leisurely conversations with academics and writers. Winner of two National Book Awards and a Pulitzer Prize, this universally praised author of The Magic Barrel, The Fixer, The Natural, and many stories that are acclaimed among the masterpieces of American fiction appears in these interviews quite appropriately as an artist devoted more to his work than to discussing it. This collection includes interviews in which Malamud gives a commentary on each of his novels and on many of his short stories. What emerges from these encounters with this great author is a sense of Malamud's deep, lifetime commitment to his art and to a seriousness of purpose. Though there is very little domestic detail or literary gossip in Malamud's conversations, these interviews reveal the essence of a great writer that the multitudes of readers inspired by his books crave to find and retain.
Download or read book Fashion Cultures written by Stella Bruzzi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the catwalk to the shopping mall, from the big screen to the art museum, fashion plays an increasingly central role in contemporary culture. Fashion Cultures investigates why we are so fascinated by fashion and the associated spheres of photography, magazines and television, and shopping. Fashion Cultures: * re-addresses the fashionable image, considering the work of designers from Paul Smith to Alexander McQueen and Hussein Chalayan * investigates the radicalism of fashion photography, from William Klein to Corinne Day * considers fashion for the 'unfashionable body' (the old and the big), football and fashion, and geographies of style * explores the relationship between fashion and the moving image in discussions of female cinema icons - from Grace Kelly to Gwyneth Paltrow - and iconic male images - from Cary Grant to Malcolm X and Mr Darcy - that have redefined notions of masculinity and cool * makes a significant intervention into contemporary gender politics and theory, exploring themes such as spectacle, masquerade, and the struggle between fashion and feminism.
Download or read book Booking Passage written by Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-12-22 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi's sweeping study of modern Jewish writing is in many ways a long meditation on the thematics of geography in Jewish culture, what she calls the "poetics of exile and return." Until the late nineteenth century, Jews were identified in their own religious and poetic imagination as wanderers and exiles, their sacred center–Jerusalem, Zion–fatefully out of reach. Opening the book with "Jewish Journeys," Ezrahi begins by examining the work of medieval Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi to chart a journey whose end was envisioned as the sublime realignment of the people with their original center. When the Holy Land became the site of a political drama of return in the nineteenth century, Jewish writing reflected the shift, traced here in the travel fictions of S.Y. Abramovitsh, S.Y. Agnon, and Sholem Aleichem. In "Jewish Geographies" Ezrahi explores aspects of reterritorialization through memory in the post-Holocaust writing of Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Aharon Appelfeld, I.B. Singer and Philip Roth. Europe, where Jews had dreamed of return, has become the new ruined shrine: The literary pilgrimages of these writers recall familiar patterns of grieving and representation and a tentative reinvention of the diasporic imagination–in America, of course, but, paradoxically, even in Zion.
Download or read book Inscribing the Other written by Sander L. Gilman and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 762 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inscribing the Other focuses on great authors who have by birth or choice (or both) found themselves outside the mainstream of their culture but who have still wished to address it: Goethe, Freud, Wilde, Heine, Nietzsche, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, among others. In thirteen probing, provocative essays Sander L. Gilman reinterprets their writing as it reveals their efforts to come to terms with their real or imagined sense of difference. The chapters treat many themes and problems, ranging widely from the romantic notion of the transcendent artist to the twentieth-century artists-in-exile, and employing the perspectives of psychiatry, aesthetics, photography, politics, and the history of mentalities. The fate of Jewish writers in modern Germany, or of Yiddish writers whose language is devalued in European culture, is explored. The theme of difference and its artistic and intellectual manifestations runs throughout the book, which includes discussions of Goethe's and Wilde's homosexuality, Nietzsche's madness, Heine's refusal to be photographed, and Primo Levi's internment at Auschwitz, as well as an interview with Singer. In a frank autobiographical introduction, Gilman attempts to understand his own writing as an exercise in "inscribing the Other," in dealing with is own sense of difference through artistic creation.
Download or read book Recovering the Canon Essays on Isaac Bashevis Singer written by Miller and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1986-12 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Yale French Studies Number 133 written by Richard J. Golsan and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Number 133 in Yale French Studies takes a new look at the themes in Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano's work This volume of Yale French Studies offers new perspectives on the work of the 2014 Nobel laureate in literature, Patrick Modiano. Including critical reassessments of themes that have informed, indeed haunted, Modiano's fiction from the outset, this collection of essays places the writer in a variety of new contexts. Topics include explorations of literary and cinematic traditions such as surrealism and film noir, situating Modiano's work among other literatures, the author's fascination with the dark years of the German Occupation, and his troubled relations with his parents.
Download or read book American Ethnic Groups the European Heritage written by Francesco Cordasco and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 1981 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No descriptive material is available for this title.
Download or read book Never Better written by Miriam Udel and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-04-18 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating study of the picaresque protagonists of Yiddish literature and their minority authors
Download or read book Beyond the Latin Lover written by Jacqueline Reich and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2004-03-19 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marcello Mastroianni is considered by many to be the consummate symbol of Italian masculinity. In this work, Jacqueline Reich goes behind the popular image to reveal a figure at odds with and out of place in the unstable political, social and sexual climate of post-war Italy.
Download or read book The Portrayal of Jews in Gdr Prose Fiction written by Paul O'Doherty and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-04-12 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first comprehensive single study of Jewish themes in any of the post-1945 German literatures. It presents literature on Jewish themes by Jewish and non-Jewish authors in the cultural, social and political context of the Soviet Zone/GDR during the entire 45 years of its history from 1945 to 1990. It offers a brief history of Jews in the GDR, before looking, in four chronologically ordered chapters, at the history of publishing on Jewish themes in the GDR. Some 28 texts by 19 different authors, including Anna Seghers, Stephan Hermlin, Arnold Zweig, Franz Fühmann, Johannes Bobrowski, Jurek Becker, Stefan Heym, Günter Kunert, Christa Wolf and Helga Königsdorf, are then singled out for closer analysis. Such themes as historical anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, Jewish resistance, Jewish assimilation, Heine, Marx, Moses Mendelssohn, Jewish survival, and Jews in the GDR are all discussed in the book. The volume also offers evidence of the political influences on publishing on Jewish themes at various stages in the GDR's history. In addition, a structured bibliography of some 1100 items is offered, approximately 750 of which were published in the GDR with a Jewish content or theme. The study should be of interest to students of contemporary German literature and politics, the GDR, and of Jewish studies in the wider context.
Download or read book Hit the Road Jack written by Gordon Slethaug and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2012 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revealing the road as an icon of American culture - always under construction.
Download or read book Ethnic Humor in Multiethnic America written by David Gillota and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-01 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When wielded by the white majority, ethnic humor can be used to ridicule and demean marginalized groups. In the hands of ethnic minorities themselves, ethnic humor can work as a site of community building and resistance. In nearly all cases, however, ethnic humor can serve as a window through which to examine the complexities of American race relations. In Ethnic Humor in Multiethnic America, David Gillota explores the ways in which contemporary comic works both reflect and participate in national conversations about race and ethnicity. Gillota investigates the manner in which various humorists respond to multiculturalism and the increasing diversity of the American population. Rather than looking at one or two ethnic groups at a time—as is common scholarly practice—the book focuses on the interplay between humorists from different ethnic communities. While some comic texts project a fantasy world in which diverse ethnic characters coexist in a rarely disputed harmony, others genuinely engage with the complexities and contradictions of multiethnic America. The first chapter focuses on African American comedy with a discussion of such humorists as Paul Mooney and Chris Rock, who tend to reinforce a black/white vision of American race relations. This approach is contrasted to the comedy of Dave Chappelle, who looks beyond black and white and uses his humor to place blackness within a much wider multiethnic context. Chapter 2 concentrates primarily on the Jewish humorists Sarah Silverman, Larry David, and Sacha Baron Cohen—three artists who use their personas to explore the peculiar position of contemporary Jews who exist in a middle space between white and other. In chapter 3, Gillota discusses different humorous constructions of whiteness, from a detailed analysis of South Park to “Blue Collar Comedy” and the blog Stuff White People Like. Chapter 4 is focused on the manner in which animated children’s film and the network situation comedy often project simplified and harmonious visions of diversity. In contrast, chapter 5 considers how many recent works, such as Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle and the Showtime series Weeds, engage with diversity in more complex and productive ways.
