The Golem Remembered, 1909-1980

The Golem Remembered, 1909-1980 PDF Author: Arnold L. Goldsmith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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The Golem in Jewish American Literature

The Golem in Jewish American Literature PDF Author: Nicola Morris
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820463841
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
The Golem in Jewish American Literature explores the golem in the fiction of Thane Rosenbaum, Nomi Eve and Steve Stern as well as writers such as Michael Chabon. Nicola Morris sees this clay humanoid, created in Jewish legend for practical and spiritual purposes, as a metaphor for power and powerlessness and for the complexities and responsibilities surrounding the act of creation. Further, she employs the golem figure as a device to examine the problematic Holocaust representation in the second generation, the uncertain boundaries between fiction and historiography, the ethics of intertextuality and the writer's responsibility to literary, folkloric and oral sources. Morris concludes with an impassioned plea for the responsible uses of power, technology and language.

The Golem Redux

The Golem Redux PDF Author: Elizabeth R. Baer
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814336272
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Traces the history of the golem legend and its appropriations in German texts and film as well as in post-Holocaust Jewish-American fiction, comics, graphic novels, and television. First mentioned in the Book of Psalms in the Hebrew Bible, the golem is a character in an astonishing number of post-Holocaust Jewish-American novels and has served as inspiration for such varied figures as Mary Shelley’s monster in her novel Frankenstein, a frightening character in the television series The X-Files, and comic book figures such as Superman and the Hulk. In The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction, author Elizabeth R. Baer introduces readers to these varied representations of the golem and traces the history of the golem legend across modern pre- and post-Holocaust culture. In five chapters, The Golem Redux examines the different purposes for which the golem has been used in literature and what makes the golem the ultimate text and intertext for modern Jewish writers. Baer begins by introducing several early manifestations of the golem legend, including texts from the third and fourth centuries and from the medieval period; Prague’s golem legend, which is attributed to the Maharal, Rabbi Judah Loew; the history of the Josefov, the Jewish ghetto in Prague, the site of the golem legend; and versions of the legend by Yudl Rosenberg and Chayim Bloch, which informed and influenced modern intertexts. In the chapters that follow, Baer traces the golem first in pre-Holocaust Austrian and German literature and film and later in post-Holocaust American literature and popular culture, arguing that the golem has been deployed very differently in these two contexts. Where prewar German and Austrian contexts used the golem as a signifier of Jewish otherness to underscore growing anti-Semitic cultural feelings, post-Holocaust American texts use the golem to depict the historical tragedy of the Holocaust and to imagine alternatives to it. In this section, Baer explores traditional retellings by Isaac Bashevis Singer and Elie Wiesel, the considerable legacy of the golem in comics, Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and, finally, "Golems to the Rescue" in twentieth- and twenty-first-century works of film and literature, including those by Cynthia Ozick, Thane Rosenbaum, and Daniel Handler. By placing the Holocaust at the center of her discussion, Baer illustrates how the golem works as a self-conscious intertextual character who affirms the value of imagination and story in Jewish tradition. Students and teachers of Jewish literature and cultural history, film studies, and graphic novels will appreciate Baer’s pioneering and thought-provoking volume.

The Golem Returns

The Golem Returns PDF Author: Cathy S. Gelbin
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472117599
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Exploring the role of the golem in the formation of modern Jewish culture

The Golem in German Social Theory

The Golem in German Social Theory PDF Author: Gad Yaʼir
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739120118
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
The Golem in German Social Theory provides an innovative and bold interpretation of German social theory. Authors Yair and Soyer argue that German scholars have been continually preoccupied with ancient, religiously-based myths that criticize the ideals of the enlightenment, exemplified by the 16th-century narrative of the Golem rising over its master.

The Blood Libel Legend

The Blood Libel Legend PDF Author: Alan Dundes
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299131149
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Alan Dundes, in this casebook of an anti-Semitic legend, demonstrates the power of folklore to influence thought and history. According to the blood libel legend, Jews murdered Christian infants to obtain blood to make matzah. Dundes has gathered here the work of leading scholars who examine the varied sources and elaborations of the legend. Collectively, their essays constitute a forceful statement against this false accusation. The legend is traced from the murder of William of Norwich in 1144, one of the first reported cases of ritualized murder attributed to Jews, through nineteenth-century Egyptian reports, Spanish examples, Catholic periodicals, modern English instances, and twentieth-century American cases. The essays deal not only with historical cases and surveys of blood libel in different locales, but also with literary renditions of the legend, including the ballad “Sir Hugh, or, the Jew’s Daughter” and Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale.” These case studies provide a comprehensive view of the complex nature of the blood libel legend. The concluding section of the volume includes an analysis of the legend that focuses on Christian misunderstanding of the Jewish feast of Purim and the child abuse component of the legend and that attempts to bring psychoanalytic theory to bear on the content of the blood libel legend. The final essay by Alan Dundes takes a distinctly folkloristic approach, examining the legend as part of the belief system that Christians developed about Jews. This study of the blood libel legend will interest folklorists, scholars of Catholicism and Judaism, and many general readers, for it is both the literature and the history of anti-Semitism.

Cynthia Ozick's Fiction

Cynthia Ozick's Fiction PDF Author: Elaine Kauvar
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253116390
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
"Superb novelists deserve first-rate literary analysis. Cynthia Ozick has found such critics... most recently in Elaine Kauvar, whose present work is simultaneously a profound contribution to Ozick interpretation and an astonishingly readable account of the novelist's ideas and artistic manner.... Highly recommended."Â -- Choice "... comprehensive and beautifully written... "Â -- Studies in the Novel "... an indispensible work of scholarship.... Cynthia Ozick's Fiction, in sum, demonstrates an astute and comprehensive grasp of both Ozick's writings and the vast store of writings that influence her... a definitive and indispensible study... "Â -- American Literature "... a rare combination of painstaking scholarship with dazzling critical intelligence and inventiveness." -- Edward Alexander "... Elaine Kauvar's comprehensive and beautifully written study of Cynthia Ozick's fiction should be welcomed as a heroic counter-cultural manifesto, both in what she says and in the elegance with which she says it." -- Congress Monthly Looking beyond the stereotype of Ozick's work as American-Jewish literature, Kauvar illuminates the intricacies of Ozick's texts and explores the dynamics of her creativity. Kauvar provides readings of all of Ozick's fiction from her first published novel, Trust, through The Messiah of Stockholm.

Reader's Guide to Judaism

Reader's Guide to Judaism PDF Author: Michael Terry
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135941572
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 1768

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Book Description
The Reader's Guide to Judaism is a survey of English-language translations of the most important primary texts in the Jewish tradition. The field is assessed in some 470 essays discussing individuals (Martin Buber, Gluckel of Hameln), literature (Genesis, Ladino Literature), thought and beliefs (Holiness, Bioethics), practice (Dietary Laws, Passover), history (Venice, Baghdadi Jews of India), and arts and material culture (Synagogue Architecture, Costume). The emphasis is on Judaism, rather than on Jewish studies more broadly.

Modern Jewish Women Writers in America

Modern Jewish Women Writers in America PDF Author: E. Avery
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230604846
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This collection includes groundbreaking essays, and interviews with scholars and writers which reveal that despite pressures of assimilation, personal goals, and in some cases, anti-Semitism, they have never been able to divorce their lives or literature from their heritage.

The Science Fiction of Phyllis Gotlieb

The Science Fiction of Phyllis Gotlieb PDF Author: Dominick Grace
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786470828
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Gotlieb is a writer central to the Canadian science fiction canon. Though she has been called the queen of Canadian SF by Robert J. Sawyer, and though David Ketterer has suggested that she is Canadian SF, Gotlieb has been largely overlooked by SF studies. This book delves deeply into her body of work and traces her career in detail. Offering close readings of Gotlieb's novels, short stories (including ones not reprinted since their initial appearances), and SF-related poetry, this study explores Gotlieb's development as a writer and her characteristic themes. The book also references her manuscripts when the differences between them and the published stories provide insights into her working methods. The book enumerates and analyzes Gotlieb's innovative explorations of common SF tropes such as the superhuman, human-alien interaction, and the galactic empire, her prevalent thematic concerns (e.g., reproduction, colonization, the mind-body relationship, the essence of "humanity") as well as her stylistically dense and literary approach to the genre.

A History of Horror

A History of Horror PDF Author: Wheeler Winston Dixon
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813550394
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Ever since horror leapt from popular fiction to the silver screen in the late 1890s, viewers have experienced fear and pleasure in exquisite combination. Wheeler Winston Dixon's A History of Horror is the only book to offer a comprehensive survey of this ever-popular film genre. Arranged by decades, with outliers and franchise films overlapping some years, this one-stop sourcebook unearths the historical origins of characters such as Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman and their various incarnations in film from the silent era to comedic sequels. A History of Horror explores how the horror film fits into the Hollywood studio system and how its enormous success in American and European culture expanded globally over time. Dixon examines key periods in the horror film-in which the basic precepts of the genre were established, then banished into conveniently reliable and malleable forms, and then, after collapsing into parody, rose again and again to create new levels of intensity and menace. A History of Horror, supported by rare stills from classic films, brings over fifty timeless horror films into frightfully clear focus, zooms in on today's top horror Web sites, and champions the stars, directors, and subgenres that make the horror film so exciting and popular with contemporary audiences.