In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot argues that the greatest art is impersonal. His position is undermined by subsequent statements on art as an expression of personality and by his own richly “personal” poetry. This article explores the pattern behind Eliot’s concept of impersonality and its philosophical grounding in his graduate studies in philosophy, arguing that he accepts the simultaneous existence of opposites and sees them as resolved in a dialectical process that at once includes and transcends contraries. The details of this dialectical process vary from artist to artist. Eliot identifies four variations: two in the “Tradition” essay and two in the 1940 memorial lecture on Yeats. The present essay illustrates these variations from the work of four writers Eliot admired – Pound, Joyce, Conrad, and Yeats.

Jewel Spears Brooker, Professor Emerita at Eckerd College, has held visiting appointments at Yale, Harvard, Cambridge, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and (in the fall of 2014) Merton College, Oxford. She is co-editor of two volumes of Eliot’s Complete Prose (2014, 2016), and has published nine books, including Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation (1990, coauthor, J. Bentley), Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism (1994), and T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews (2004). She has received numerous awards and served as president of the South Atlantic MLA and as a member of the National Humanities Council.

updated: July 19, 2014

In response to the stern image of Rachmetov in Nikolai G. Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? (1863), the interest in which was considerably enhanced by an article coming from the pen of Dmitrii I. Pisarev, three major Russian works of 1868 -- Fedor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, the final installments of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (where Platon Karataev appears), and Alexey K. Tolstoy’s play Tsar Fedor Ioannovich -- create their own versions of what Dostoevsky called “a positively beautiful person.” The three works were responses to a profound inner need felt in the contemporary Russian society, and they implicitly pit Chernyshevsky’s revolutionary version of imitatio Christi against their own hagiographical images in which the saintly opposition to mundane or hegemonic values is combined with a restrained comicality that both invites and distances the sympathy of the reader.

This paper suggests that English Biblical plays produced during the1550s played a part in the controversies set in motion by the newly emergent culture of iconoclasm. As the iconoclastic culture gained ascendancy, playwrights were forced to employ all of their inventiveness not only to entertain audiences but to find methods of retaining Biblical images on the English stage. In their reluctance to yield to iconoclastic pressures, dramatists used a series of complex strategies to legitimize the representation of residual Catholic spectacle on stage.

      Through an analysis of two contemporary Biblical plays -- Lewis Wager’s The Life and Repentaunce of Mary Magdalene (1550?) and the anonymous play Jacob and Esau (1558) the paper shows how playwrights negotiated the legitimacy of Biblical drama despite the constraints of a culture increasingly informed by iconoclastic tendencies -- how they seem to heed to the pressures of reformation while at the same time continuing to use traditionally Catholic Biblical imagery and overcoming -- if only temporarily -- the increasing opposition towards such imagery.

The talion law, which stipulates an exact retribution of "eye for eye" in cases of injury or murder, is commonly associated with the Vengeful God of the New Testament and with the favoring of literality over spirituality. In opposition to such a view, this essay, based on a close reading of the Talmud and later Jewish commentators, and equipped with the insights of contemporary structuralist and post-structuralist theory, analyzes the modes that the Jewish tradition offers for the displacement of the literal. It attempts to show that a detour into a figurative reading of lex talionis is what effects, through subtle rhetoric, a restitution of its original sense, both ethical and ontological.

March 2023:

Betty Rojtman is Professor Emerita at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has been the Katherine Cornell Professor of Comparative Literature. As the chair of the Department of French studies, she has founded the Desmarais Center for French Culture at the Hebrew University, and headed it for many years. Her current research deals with Transcendence and Negativity in traditional Jewish sources (Midrash, Hassidism, Kabbalah) and (post)modern texts (literature, philosophy).

Professor Rojtman is the author of several books, including Feu noir sur Feu Blanc: Essai sur l'herméneutique juive (Verdier, 1986); English translation, by Steven Rendall, Black Fire on White Fire: An Essay on Jewish Hermeneutics, from Midrash to Kabbalah, Prefaced by Moshe Idel, 1998), Une grave distraction. Preface by Paul Ricoeur (Balland, 1991), Une Rencontre improbable: Equivoques de la destinée (Gallimard, 2002).

In parallel to her academic work, she writes meditative and poetical essays (Le Pardon à la lune: Essai sur le tragique biblique, Gallimard, 2001. trans. Hebrew by Nir Ratzkovski, Seli’hat halevana, Al hatragiut hatana’hit, Jerusalem, Carmel, 2008), Moïse, prophète des nostalgies (Gallimard, 2007).

Her most recent essay (Une faim d’abîme. La fascination de la mort dans l’écriture contemporaine, Desclée de Brouwer, 2019), has come out in English as Longing for the Abyss: The fascination for death in Contemporary French Thought, trans. Bartholomew Begley (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2020) and in Hebrew as Kemiha Latehom. Kessem Hamavet bahagut hatzarfatit shel hameah haesserim, trans. Itay Blumenzweig (Tel-Aviv: Resling, 2020).

This essay investigates the concept, experience, and autobiographical rendering of recognition.  The first two sections consider and elaborate upon two philosophical accounts of recognition: those by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Charles Taylor.  The essay then reads a contemporary work of Australian life-writing, Peter Rose’s award winning Rose Boys, as an autobiographical exploration of recognition. The essay argues that recognition is a many-faceted concept and phenomenon with a range of important moral, political, logical and perceptual implications, and that it is central to the genre of autobiography.

Vladimir Pecherin (1807-1885), a Russian political emigré and Catholic convert was a controversial figure both in nineteenth-century Ireland and in Russian intellectual history. In his autobiographical notes and in the letters to his Russian corespondents of the 1860s and the 1870s, eventually collected in Apologia pro vita mea (Mémoires d'outre-tombe), Pecherin provides a vivid display of the evolution of Russian thought. His writings as a whole constitute an artistic presentation of the Russian Zeitgeist. Certain glaring contradictions between the ideas expressed in Pecherin's Russian correspondence and the reality of his long life within the Catholic Church require explanation. The article focuses on the authorial intention behind Pecherin’s autobiographical writing. In the hope of cementing his connection with Russia, Pecherin created in his memoirs the largely stock literary image of a “superfluous man,” a dominant literary figure of nineteenth-century Russian literature. Pecherin’s practical activity within the Catholic Church was, however, by no means superfluous, as his reputation in Dublin attests. Pecherin’s epistles to Russia invert the genre of  “confession of conversion” and form a “confession of disillusionment.” Pecherin’s “hero” writes a repentant story in which he recounts a life-long pattern of devotion to various deceptive illusions, among which he counts Socialism, Hegelianism, as well as Catholicism and religion in general. The constant reinventions of himself are matched by surprising flexibility of his literary style, which seems to imitate the major voices of Russian classic literature, from Karamzin and Dostoevsky to Turgenev. If we acknowledge that Pecherin’s memoirs are primarily a work of art and only then a source of historically accurate information, many of his apparent contradictions are explained.

The article is a historiographical against-the-grain reading of archetypal constructions of Virginia Woolf’s “madness.” A genealogical tracing of Woolf’s own testimonials concerning her mental life is juxtaposed with the interpretive analytic specularization of her primary biographers. This new lens exposes the normative reading practices that have produced, simultaneously, both the problematic of Woolf’s “madness” and a near elision of any traces of the conditions of its own production. Woolf’s writing about her “contrary instincts” is examined without searching for underlying pathology; the latter would have amounted to reinscribing Woolf in the institualization of “mental illness.”

The essay discusses parallels in the work of Franz Kafka and Shmuel Yosef Agnon as writers whose rebellion against tradition and authority was complicated by ambivalent nostalgia for the harmonies of God and Kaiser.

Major works:

   in Hebrew
      Between Laughter and Tears (on Mendele Mokher Sefarim), Tel-Aviv, 1965
      The Hebrew Historical Drama, Jerusalem, 1970
      A New Wave in Modern Hebrew Narrative Fiction, Tel-Aviv, 1971
      The Narrative Art of Agnon, Tel-Aviv, 1973
      Hebrew Narrative Fiction  1880-1980 (Five Volumes) Tel-Aviv, 1977-1998

  in English
     The Shadows Within: Essays on Modern Jewish Writers, Philadelphia,1987
     S. Y. Agnon: A Revolutionary Traditionalist, New-York,1989
     Modern Hebrew Fiction, Bloomington, 2000

      The New Tradition: Essays on Modern Hebrew Literature, 2006

  in German
     Die Macht der Identitaet, Frankfurt, 1986
     Die Geschichte der modernen hebraeschen Literatur, Frankfurt, 1996.

updated in January 2007

Is there a “natural” fit between gender and the pacifist or military impulse? The article traces the trajectory of the thinking on this issue ever since the initiation of women into the peace movements of nineteenth-century Europe, placing it in the context of the general philosophical shift from essentialism to constructivism. It is argued that the demotion of “the maternal” -- the emblem of pacifism since the early 19th century -- took place in the later work of Virginia Woolf, well before the post-gender heydays of the 1980s. Although the term gender was obviously not available to Woolf, she undermined the conventional division between the sexes through her use of the term androgyny, which prepared her to take on the conventional discourse about aggression, war, and maternal pacifism. A contrastive analysis of the uses and abuses of sexual difference and the maternal metaphor in the works of Woolf and the 19th-century pacifist Charlotte Gilman shows that while amalgamating liberal and radical positions, Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) in fact anticipated – via its hostile dialogue with Freud – not only the gendering of peace and war but also the contemporary psycho-political analyses of the nexus of sexuality and nationalism.

January 2004: Yael S. Feldman is the Abraham I. Katsh Professor of Hebrew Culture and Education and Professor of Comparative Literature at NYU, where she teaches Hebrew and Comparative Literature and Gender Theory. She is Associate Editor of the literary journals Prooftexts and Hebrew Studies. The latest of her five books, No Room of Their Own: Gender and Nation in Israeli Women’s Fiction (Columbia University Press, 1999) was a National Jewish Book Awards Finalist. The Hebrew version, Lelo heder mishelahen (Hakkibutz hameuchad, 2002) won the Abraham Friedman Award for Hebrew Literature (2003). Current research: the nexus of politics and psychoanalysis in theories of peace and in Modern Hebrew culture.

This essay has two main arguments, the first of which proposes a model for understanding narrative beginnings that focuses on both their textual dynamics (designated by the concepts of exposition and launch) and their corresponding readerly dynamics (designated by the concepts of introduction and entrance) and then uses that model to analyze Austen’s atypical beginning and its consequences in Persuasion. The novel’s exposition and launch do not invite the audience to feel that they have entered a comic world, one in which the protagonist’s eventual happiness is assured. Instead, Austen delays these assurances until the setting of the novel shifts to Lyme. As a result, Austen interjects into her comedy some striking new elements: unmerited suffering by the protagonist without any promise that it is only temporary; an awareness that the happy outcome could have been achieved by way of a much less painful route; and a corresponding awareness that, despite the happy outcome, the painful past has permanent effects. The second argument contrasts this view of Persuasion’s form and ideology with the account of both offered by Mary Poovey. Where Poovey sees the form papering over tensions in the ideology of romantic love, this essay sees the novel’s attitude toward love as more realistic than romantic. Furthermore, the analysis suggests that, in the effort to connect form and ideology, critics are likely to be better served by starting with form and then working out toward ideology rather than starting with ideology and working back toward form.

The paper analyzes a number of cultural patterns of individualism since the late nineteenth century to our times, taking into account its national and gender variants and patterns of conflict and violence. It argues that the liberal New Women literature, especially written by women, opted not so much for independence, with its emphasis on self-affirmation, as for autonomy, which also valorized relationships and shared goals. The technological revolution, which promoted the rise of mass societies, and the current Information Age, in which political freedom risks transforming itself into market democracy and respect for individuality into a cult of “recombinance,” have produced types of self-affirmation that actually tend to come full circle to submerging individuality in social environment.

The paper analyzes a number of cultural patterns of individualism since the late nineteenth century to our times, taking into account its national and gender variants and patterns of conflict and violence. It argues that the liberal New Women literature, especially written by women, opted not so much for independence, with its emphasis on self-affirmation, as for autonomy, which also valorized relationships and shared goals. The technological revolution, which promoted the rise of mass societies, and the current Information Age, in which political freedom risks transforming itself into market democracy and respect for individuality into a cult of “recombinance,” have produced types of self-affirmation that actually tend to come full circle to submerging individuality in social environment.