The volcanic eruption that occurred in Pompeii almost two millennia ago and the city’s more recent excavation have fuelled the literary imaginations of many great thinkers. This paper examines the evolutions of the motif in the Twentieth Century, through the inter and intratextual meeting of Joseph Conrad’s The Arrow of Gold, Sigmund Freud’s “Jensen’s Gradiva and Other Stories” and Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever. The treatment of the Pompeiian motif in these texts suggests that the themes of mourning and loss that inevitably color the tragic event are coupled by themes of desire, longing and hope. The latter are incited precisely where loss has been fixed, and the lost object can no longer be resurrected or found. For Conrad, the Pompeiian image signals a recurring theme of unrequited yearning or impossible love. Consummation is deferred or impeded, eliciting both the protagonist’s and the reader’s desire. Freud describes the manner in which the motif of Pompeii is emblematic of his notion of repression, where the latent exerts its power over the manifest. However, where Conrad delights in delay, Freud expounds the psychoanalytic drive to unmask and recover. In Derrida’s reading, the Pompeiian motif is likened to the figure of the archive which is not only responsible for the preservation of memory, but is also a dynamic force that forms its content as it comes into being. In opposition to Freud, the emphasis is placed not on the past but on the future, on the singular experience of the promise. Although this recalls Conrad’s temporality of deferral, here the promise is not ironized by an underlying impossibility but rather suffused with hope. The juxtaposition of the three writers thus testifies to the paradoxical fusion that lies at the heart of the ancient site. At once past and present, the image of Pompeii endures in the imagination as an object of desire, a figure that can never be possessed.

The article deals with literary constructions of memory of the Holocaust as it happened on the territory of the Soviet Union. This article focuses on the slaughter of Kiev’s Jews in the ravine Babii Iar, September 29--October 3, 1941, the horrifying event that has received the most significant treatment in officially permitted Soviet literature. Complicating the problem of confronting the Holocaust on Soviet soil were two contradictory tasks: 1) the authors’ goal of remembering the Nazis’ deliberately anti-Jewish genocide in the context of their also deliberate anti-Slavic and anti-Soviet designs, and 2) the editors’ and censors’ goal of reasserting a specious Soviet ideology of internationalist, egalitarian “humanism” that held that no nationality should get a preferential treatment. Works discussed range from those of the 1940s (Erenburg, Grossman, and Ozerov), through the 1960s (Evtushenko, Kuznetsov), to the 1970s (Rybakov). 

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

The paper begins by examining the structure of a joke as illustrative of the nature of the selection of things, selves, and others from the Real.  The equivocal character of such selections, even in their very singularity, is brought out and is shown to extend beyond that of the Joke, to the Story and to the process of language.  The mismatch of interpersonal positions is shown to depend upon a tacit understanding that apes the structure of trust.  This blind trust is capable of being developed into a genuine one through the acceptance of the irremediable difference of the other and the risk it involves.

This philosophy of narrative is then tested against Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale where the nature of trust or “trouthe” is one of the central moral concerns. The article questions the various approaches to the dilemmas staged in the Tale, particularly with regard to the nature of marriage, since this is a prime example of the tragicomic trajectories of those who engage in mutual acts of “trouthe.”

Yechiel Fajner (also known as Karl Tsetinski, Yechiel De-Nur, and Ka-Tzetnik 135633),  author of six books on the Holocaust, wrote his first book (Salamandra) in Naples 1945. This article deals with the organic connection between the title “Salamandra” and the content of the novel against the background of the author’s Holocaust experience in Nazi ghettos and concentration camps (Auschwitz and Günthergrube). While considering himself a chronicler of the Holocaust, Ka-Tzetnik created a literary style making use of cultural and literary symbols found in world literature and Jewish literature (from the Talmud to modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature). One of his central symbols is rooted in the myth of the Salamander, which in this article is analyzed in detail via a discussion of Ka-Tzetnik’s different sources.

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.

Although critics have seen Dickens as having emphasized the individual and domestic life at the expense of politics in A Tale of Two Cities, the novel offers reasons for thinking that Dickens was using it as an occasion for reevaluating our understanding of moral agency in modernity. In emphasizing resemblances that seem to blur the boundaries between individuals, Dickens calls attention to the ways in which we are not morally autonomous, in which our abilities to act are conditioned by our sometimes being taken for others. While that predicament might seem lamentable, Dickens concludes the novel by presenting Sydney Carton as a character who recognizes it well enough to see it as a riddle, and a riddle to be solved.

The essay studies the scene of recognition in four novels by Dickens -- Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, and A Tale of Two Cities. It argues that Dickens’s use of the topos of recognition is linked to a specific view of social reality centered on the belief that the legitimacy of the social order and the place of individuals within it are predicated on continuity. The variations that the four novels offer on this topos should be understood as the means by which Dickens attempts to work out a persuasive way of promoting and protecting this view of social reality in spite of the contradictions and impasses it entails.

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).