by
Schechter, Ronald.
Call Number
305.892404409033 22
Publication Date
2003
Summary
Enlightenment writers, revolutionaries, and even Napoleon discussed and wrote about France's tiny Jewish population at great length. Why was there so much thinking about Jews when they were a minority of less than one percent and had little economic and virtually no political power? In this unusually wide-ranging study of representations of Jews in eighteenth-century France--both by Gentiles and Jews themselves--Ronald Schechteroffers fresh perspectives on the Enlightenment and French Revolution, on Jewish history, and on the nature of racism and intolerance. Informed by the latest historical scholarship and by the insights of cultural theory, Obstinate Hebrews is a fascinating tale of cultural appropriation cast in the light of modern society's preoccupation with the "other." Schechter argues that the French paid attention to the Jews because thinking about the Jews helped them reflect on general issues of the day. These included the role of tradition in religion, the perfectibility of human nature, national identity, and the nature of citizenship. In a conclusion comparing and contrasting the "Jewish question" in France with discourses about women, blacks, and Native Americans, Schechter provocatively widens his inquiry, calling for a more historically precise approach to these important questions of difference.
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Electronic Resources
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57341.3789
by
Hughes, Edward J. (Edward Joseph), 1953-
Call Number
840.9355 21
Publication Date
2001
Summary
"Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature explores how cultural centres require the peripheral, the outlawed, and the deviant in order to define and bolster themselves. It analyses the hierarchies of cultural value which inform the work of six modern French writers: the exoticist Pierre Loti; Paul Gauguin, whose Noa Noa enacts European fantasies about Polynesia; Proust, who analyses such exemplary figures of exclusion and inclusion as the homosexual and the xenophobe; Montherlant, who claims to subvert colonialist values in La Rose de sable; Camus, who pleads an alienating detachment from the cultures of both metropolitan France and Algeria; and Jean Genet. Crucially Genet, typecast as France's moral pariah, charts Palestinian statelessness in his last work, Un captif amoureux (1986), and reflects ethically on the dispossession of the Other and the violence inherent in the West's marginalization of cultural difference."--Jacket.
Format:
Electronic Resources
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0.4952
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by
Cándida Smith, Richard.
Call Number
809.915 21
Publication Date
1999
Summary
"In a narrative combining intellectual and cultural history, Richard Candida Smith unfolds the legacy of Stephane Mallarme, the poet who fathered the symbolist movement in poetry and art. Through the lens of symbolism, Candida Smith focuses on a variety of subjects: sexual liberation and the erotic, anarchism, utopianism, labor, and women's creative role. Paradoxically, the symbolists' reconfiguration of elite culture fit effectively into the modern commercial media. After Mallarme was rescued from obscurity, symbolism became a valuable commodity, exported by France to America and elsewhere in the market-driven turn-of-the-century world. Mallarme's Children traces not only how poets regarded their poetry and artists their art but also how the public learned to think in new ways about cultural work and to behave differently as a result."--Jacket.
Format:
Electronic Resources
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0.4099
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