Saul Bellow’s 1947 novel The Victim has as its frontispiece two epigraphs: one from “The Tale of the Trader and the Jinni,” from The Thousand and One Nights, and the other from Thomas de Quincey’s The Pains of Opium. The epigraphs set the stage for Bellow’s protagonist’s anxious reflections about his responsibility toward his fellow sufferers, a moral condition which Asa Leventhal at first attempts to deny but to which he ultimately succumbs. These opening epigraphs — cautionary tales of accountability and moral reckoning — not only introduce the novel’s tensions and ambiguities but also frame the unraveling of Bellow’s fraught and apprehensive central character, whose anxieties about his accountability toward others threaten to become his undoing.

By discussing two literary texts by immigrants from Europe in America, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, a Love Story (1966) and Edgar Hilsenrath’s Fuck America (Bronskys Geständnis, 1980), the essays examines the Holocaust survivors’ gradual subversion of pre-determined national, religious, and communal identities. In each of the texts, the urban environment has a double and seemingly contradictory effect on the survivors’ lives: it is an obstacle but also an opportunity. The multiplying sounds, languages, faces, and buildings seem at first to be a threat to the protagonists’ existence but later on provide the means for their radical liberation. As an eternal outsider, the survivor’s past experience correlates and is constantly juxtaposed to his current urban life. This juxtaposition creates a desire for anonymity, as an immediate reaction to the identity which was foisted upon each protagonist during the war in Europe. Singer’s Herman Broder and Hilsenrath’s Jakob Bronsky are literary models that offer, in their grim life stories, a new set of human relationships, personal behavioral characteristics, and private day to day procedures that correlate to the deviant city’s schizoid features. My discussion of the novels relies on Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life. De Certeau’s observations regarding the ordinary mundane procedures that constitute the urban “pedestrian” text illuminate the way in which the protagonists’ stories incorporate, rather than ignore or resolve, their contradictory, fragmentary, and unsystematic components.

Both William Shakespeare (1564–1616) and his contemporary Chinese counterpart Tang Xianzu (1550–1616) explore three types of human lust — incest, zoophilia and greed for power but show remarkable disparities in the ways of treating them. Shakespearean plays and western classical drama in general present more severe forms of incest, whereas Tang Xianzu’s works and traditional Chinese drama as a whole are quite free from incest between blood relatives, which is muted as an abhorred violation of Confucian principles guiding family life. By contrast, Tang Xianzu demonstrates tolerance of zoophilia; whereas Shakespeare’s oblique evocation of zoophilia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream reflects his culture’s intolerance of bestiality. In regard to greed for power, Tang Xianzu’s protagonists never have political ambitions that go beyond the position of prime minister, showing no covetous desire for the throne; Shakespeare, however, includes several incidents of regicide in his plays. The paper points to the difference in the cultural contexts of the two masters lived that to a large extent determine the difference in their ways of representing these forms of lust.

June 2016: Chen Maoqing is Associate Professor in the English Department, the School of Foreign Languages, of East China Normal University in Shanghai. His research interests are comparative drama, Australian literature, and applied linguistics. As a Fulbright visiting scholar, he researched “Traditional Chinese Drama on the American Stage: Performance and Receptions since 1850s” at the University of California, Irvine, in 2013-14. He has just completed the Shanghai municipal project on “The Dissemination and Reception of Traditional Chinese Theatres in Hawaii” and is currently working on the state-funded project “The Dissemination and Reception of Traditional Chinese Theaters across the United States of America.” His articles include “Chinese Plays on the Hawaiian Stage: 1905-1976,” “Women as ‘Dasein’: A Philosophical Approach to Maria Irene Fornes’ Fefu and Her Friends,” “A Young Artist Struggling in the Bush: On the Heroine in Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career” and “Tacit Knowledge and Second Language Acquisition.”       

This paper argues that in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens provides an alternative to the dominant aesthetic paradigm of his time, organicism. While organic form implies unity in the many, dust in this novel offers an aesthetic of similitude in which the whole is nothing but the part replicated over and over. Through the use of recurrences and doubling, the novel comes to embody this aesthetic. Social formations in the novel similarly challenge organic form, as familial roles are empty shells that characters only temporarily inhabit. When Dickens departs from organic ideals of differentiation and progress, he challenges the liberal principle of individuation.

Samuel Beckett´s poetics offers a paradoxical fusion of the compulsion to write and an inability to do so. Such a slippage from inspiration to expiration is in many ways definitive of twentieth-century thought on writing and subjectivity. Fraught with an obsessive preoccupation with the obligation to write, Molloy houses a crew of agents whose sole purpose is to impress this obligation upon two rather unwilling protagonists. This paper argues that the novel’s self-reflexive preoccupation with writing is symptomatic of a late modernist suspicion of discrete and independent authorship. In an attempt to tease out the fluid conceptualizations of writing and subjectivity as they emerge in the text, these figures of imposition are read alongside Coleridge’s preface to “Kubla Khan,” a literary antecedent that haunts the novel. The paper suggests that the evolution from a Romantic to a Modernist conceptualization of inspiration hinges on the figure of interruption. If the anxiety that riddles Coleridge´s preface is brought on by the inevitable cessation of writing as epitomized in the “person from Porlock,” Molloy  demonstrates that writing is interruption; it is a doing and undoing of the subject within the endlessly circulating language of a poststructuralist intertext. Beckett´s reworking of Coleridge´s anecdote unfolds as a transgressive and generative exploration of subjectivity that is inseparable from the novel´s thematization of writing: the subject is both agent and receptacle of the writing that generates him. Turning to the work of Maurice Blanchot and Gilles Deleuze, the paper concludes by considering a writing that exceeds subjectivity and leads beyond dialectics, beyond ontology. 

Yael Levin is Senior Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her work on Joseph Conrad has appeared in Conradiana, The Conradian, Partial Answers, Secret Sharers (2011) Each Other's Yarns (2013) and her book, Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad's Novels (Palgrave Macmillan 2008). She is currently working on The Interruption of Writing, a book that traces the evolution of models of textual production and creative agency from Romanticism to the Digital Age.

(updated January 2016)

Yael Levin is Senior Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her work on Joseph Conrad has appeared in Conradiana, The Conradian, Partial Answers, Secret Sharers (2011) Each Other's Yarns (2013) and her book, Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad's Novels (Palgrave Macmillan 2008). She is currently working on The Interruption of Writing, a book that traces the evolution of models of textual production and creative agency from Romanticism to the Digital Age.

updated January 2016

This essay examines the moral dimension of Jewish survival during the Holocaust as portrayed in the Salamandra sextet by Yehiel Dinur, known as “Ka-Tzetnik 135633.” Critics such as Omer Bartov and Iris Milner observe a collective process of social and moral disintegration among Ka-Tzetnik’s characters — reflecting factual occurrences familiar from the work of survivors and scholars, such as Primo Levi, Eugen Kogon, or Wolfgang Sofsky. My close reading of Ka-Tzetnik’s novels, in contrast, suggests that Salamandra (1946), House of Dolls (1953) and Piepel (1961) abound in acts that demonstrate how solidarity and humanity were retained among Jews in the camps and ghettos. Furthermore, following James Phelan’s recent work on literary ethics, I show that this type of acts is in fact accentuated in the novels’ rhetorical design, which constructs the author’s moral viewpoint as the upholding of spiritual and moral values in resistance to the Nazi genocide.

June 2016: Or Rogovin (Ph.D. 2012, University of Washington) is the Silbermann Family Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern Hebrew at the Department of Languages, Cultures, and Linguistics at Bucknell University. His areas of research and teaching include Modern Jewish Literatures, Holocaust Studies, and narrative theory, especially responses to the Holocaust in Hebrew and Israeli literature. Recent publications:

“‘Count him a human being’: David Grossman’s See Under: Love and Holocaust Perpetrators in Israeli Fiction” (forthcoming in Prooftexts).

“The Limits of Holocaust Representation in the Fiction of the 1948 Generation.” Iyunim Be-Tekumat Israel 23(2013):176–203 (in Hebrew).

“Chelm as Shtetl: Y. Y. Trunk’s Khelemer khakhomim.” Prooftexts, 29:2 (2010): 242–272.

This article traces the ways in which memories of historical trauma inscribed in the built environment of Buenos Aires, Lima, and Cusco inform the fiction of Argentine Tununa Mercado and Peruvian Karina Pacheco Medrano. Each author represents fictional cityspaces after projects of public memorialization have already begun to carve out spaces of memory in response to dictatorship (Argentina) and to the conflict with the Shining Path (Peru). These novelists, neither of whom is Jewish, map the relationship between the spatial dimension of the textual and the textual dimension of the spatial, acknowledging the value and meaning of invisibilized Jewish bodies whose presence continues to haunt the modern urban space.

June 2016: Erica Smeltzer is a Ph.D. Candidate in Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  Her dissertation project is entitled, Urban Space and National Memory: The Narratives of Prague, Gdańsk and Berlin. It addresses the representation of national history and identity in the physical and literary topography of urban centers. 

With reference to the establishment of the Venice Ghetto 500 years ago as a landmark in the history of Jewish spaces, the “Introduction” surveys the literary/geographical/cultural spaces of modern Jewish experience discussed in the papers of the forum.

This article analyzes Proust’s listening by placing it in the contexts of French reception of late Beethoven in Proust’s era.  At stake are questions of perception of and through the work of art, of music as the figure of something greater than love or desire in Proust.  Thinking music and silence together, through the framework of “modern” listening, allows us to see how Proust seeks new definitions of time within subjectivity.  By bringing together Beethoven’s era, Proust’s, and our own, we can articulate how both Beethoven and Proust push the limits of tonality and temporality in order to hear what had never before been sounded and to which their work gives voice.

In their book Kafka Deleuze and Guattari mention Samuel Beckett as a prime example of a minor writer. The article explores this insight about Beckett’s practice as a minor writer, focusing on his first novel published in French, Molloy (1951). It further inquires into the importance of multilingualism to the change in Beckett’s style after World War II and its connection with the transition from English to French.

Suffering is at the core of Jewish-American literature in general and in the fiction of Saul Bellow and Chaim Potok in particular. Bellow and Potok, affirmative writers who believe in man’s redemption through suffering, portray characters that evoke the Job-like “suffering man” whose endurance and faith in God are finally rewarded. “Schooling in grief,” a phrase borrowed from Bellow’s Herzog (1964), can also be applied to Bellow’s The Victim (1947) and Potok’s The Chosen (1967). The paper reads these two novels with the notion of the I/It and I/Thou relationship as explained in Martin Buber’s I and Thou (1923). The characters in The Victim and The Chosen move from the I/It to the I/Thou encounter through suffering, which eventually leads towards mutual understanding and love for the other.

In 2014 New Perspectives Theatre Company staged the first adaptation on the stage of a short story by Saul Bellow, “Him with His Foot in His Mouth.” The changes made to the story in its adaptation for the stage inform our understanding of the comic effect of the story, particularly in relation to the different endings involved. The dynamic of the story depends upon the deployment of two different concepts of comedy — as the expression of an aggressive, materialistic society (Freud, The Joke in Relation to the Unconscious)  or as a means of reforming society in green comedy (Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism). The story focusses upon the legitimate irresponsibility of comedy, and on the relation of comedy to freedom, defending it as a social and even a sacred good. The one-liners uttered by the hero exemplify comedy of a corrective nature, offering a healthy critique of social behavior, particularly in terms of the relation of art to money, and contest Freud’s theory as tainted by its social context and economic basis.

According to Saul Bellow (1915–2005), one of the main responsibilities of the novelist is to expose “the center” and to adjudicate among the many explanations, rationalizations, defenses, and subterfuges that constitute modern life. Bellow cautions against the “noise” of modern life because, he believes, it distracts one from the center, from the essence of human experience. Amidst the chaos of modern life, Bellow’s fiction — novels and short stories of contemplation and of meditated reflection — is a stay against confusion. The “Introduction to the Forum” establishes the context for a discussion of Bellow’s works and frames the issues raised in the individual articles in the Forum.

Saul Bellow’s fiction is decidedly philosophic, particularly as he celebrates depth of personhood in his characters while denigrating superficiality. The discursive action of this focus on personal depth involves the idea of soul, which, for Bellow, resonates in individual characters in his fiction as well as in the “character” of culture, usually viewed in historical decline, one of his preoccupations. This essay examines this dual understanding of soul — as a function of individual character and as the “character” of culture — in two of Bellow’s novels: Humboldt’s Gift (1975) and Ravelstein (2000). Both are concerned with the tension between the grandeur of art and ideas and the depredations of rising commercial culture in America. In Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow offers an initial view of the messy genius of a great intellectual, while in Ravelstein the persona of a great intellectual is fully developed and even more explicitly presented in terms of the relation between such “greatness of soul” and cultural and intellectual decline in late-capitalism. In both novels, an aesthetic of great personhood works through characterization, with “greatness” revealing itself metonymically as aestheticized relational energy and in the genius for seeing revealed essences. In the characters of Von Humboldt Fleisher and Abe Ravelstein, characters based on two of Saul Bellow’s teachers and intellectual heroes, Delmore Schwartz and Allan Bloom, Bellow explores a type of intellectual heroism, the loss of which, he believes, has severe, even catastrophic, cultural consequences.

This article explores Heinrich Heine’s two texts about Jews and Jewish life, Über Polen and Der Rabbi von Bacherach, to show how the foundations for a Jewish homeland were laid in Jewish literature of early 19^th-century Western and Central Europe. The article demonstrates how a common Jewish space was established in Heine’s texts and how this space intellectually and emotionally came to signify home for modern Jewish readers. It presents a new perspective on the spaces of Heine’s early works by focusing on what was particularly Jewish about these spaces. Heine’s establishment of a Jewish cultural space began with a journey to Eastern Europe. In Polish villages Heine found the inspiration for a Jewish cultural landscape that he would describe in a romantically idealized way in Über Polen and Der Rabbi von Bacherach, attaching positive values to Jewish traditional lifestyle and incorporating scriptural references of the kind that made traditional Jewish life accessible to assimilated Jews and non-Jews alike. Heine took his readers into Jewish spaces such as a Jewish home, synagogue, and street. He gave the Jewish readers a sense of togetherness, of belonging to a Jewish space that was available through literature. The article explores the potential of Jewish cultural space and shows how Heine constructed a modern Jewish cultural space with room for both traditional and modern Jews.

June 2016: Cecilie S. Schrøder Simonsen is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Culture and Identity at Roskilde University, Denmark. Her work approaches an understanding of modern Jewish spaces by exploring the cultural significance of home in 19th-century Western European sources. She is particularly interested in Jewish ghetto literature, historical novels, and village tales. Her publications include articles and chapters on 19th-century Jewish cultural space and Danish Jewish writer Meïr Aron Goldschmidt.