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).

Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury offers an early exploration of racial and cultural identity within the wider context of a nascent colonial expansion. He and his brother, the poet George Herbert, question dominant notions of race, culture, and color. Their poems bring color associations from abstract theological and philosophical levels to present the intimacy of human contact in intercultural and interracial contexts. The result is a view of human connectedness that affirms equality and commonality over dominant views of European superiority and priority.

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.

The paper locates Svengali, the Jewish villain of the novel Trilby (1894), within historical and literary contexts that informed the culture of his creator, George Du Maurier. It argues that Svengali emblematizes the figure of the Jew that is seen by late nineteenth-century European culture as troubling the cultural categories invoked for purposes of national self-definition; additionally Svengali reflexively troubles the generic categories that work to contain and define the novel in which he appears. In doing so, Svengali re-enacts the situation of the transgressive Wandering Jew, escaping the confines of his text to wander textually homeless in the popular imagination.

This article analyses some seminal novels by Dickens, Disraeli, Gaskell, and Kingsley in their relation to developments in society and welfare of the early Victorian period, inferring from them a social discourse that challenged some but not all aspects of classical political economics. It argues that they reveal a view of society as “trisected,” that is as one in which the realms of production, distribution and reproduction are barely regarded as occupying the same conceptual space. So while some aspects of social policy are deplored, e.g. the workhouse, some of the assumptions and values upon which they were based are upheld. Rather than extensive institutional reform these books demand a new set of ethical coordinates which reflect a growing awareness of the interdependencies of individuals.

The essay examines some of the fascinating ways in which islands have inspired writers, and especially poets, into acts of symbolization in which an island provides the pretext for a variety of compulsive themes that range from the love or fear of solitude, isolation, and the need to escape to or from an island. The recurrent figures of this allegorical mode include Crusoe, Caliban, Odysseus, and The Man Who Loved Islands.