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More than twenty years ago, the Italian chemist, writer, and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi fell to his death from the stairwell of his apartment building in Turin. Within hours, a debate exploded as to whether his death was an accident or a suicide and, if the latter, how this might force us to reinterpret his legacy as a writer and survivor. Many weighed in with thoughtful and sometimes provocative commentary, but the debate over his death has sometimes overshadowed the larger significance of his place as a thinker after Auschwitz. This volume contains chapters that deal directly with Levi and his work; others tangentially use Levi's writings or ideas to explore larger issues in Holocaust studies, philosophy, theology, and the problem of representation. They are included here in the spirit that Levi described himself: proud of being impureand a centaur, cognizant that asymmetry is the fundamental structure of organic life. “I became a Jew in Auschwitz,” Levi once wrote, comparing the concentration camp to a university of life. Yet he could also paradoxically admit, in an interview late in life: “There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.” Rather than seek to untangle these contradictions, Levi embraced them. This volume seeks to embrace them as well.

The infidel-conversion motif—in which Jews and Muslims convert to Christianity—is a staple of romance narratives by Roman Catholic writers in medieval and early modern Europe. Baptisms and conversions of infidels lead to an important telos of the romance genre: Despite their narrative wanderings and deferrals, romances often contain transformations of identity that lead to the incorporation of the other into Christian community. Uses of the infidel-conversion motif wane in post-Reformation England, however, in the wake of a Protestant theology that deemphasized the power of baptism to create Christian identity. Whereas Catholic theology had asserted that Christian identity begins with baptism, numerous theologians in the Church of England denied the necessity of baptism for salvation and instead treated Christian identity as a racial characteristic passed from parents to their children. The Church of England’s baptismal theology transformed Christians and “infidels” into distinctive races. This book examines English translations of Calvin, treatises on the sacraments, catechisms, and sermons alongside works by Edmund Spenser, John Harington, William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, and Phillip Massinger. Through charting the intersections of race, Protestant theology, and literary form, this book intervenes in critical debates about the relationship between racial and religious identity in early modern England, as well as in discussions of the social implications of romance.

This book is a study of the workings of a monolingual paradigm and of multilingual attempts to overcome it. It argues that monolingualism—the idea that having just one language is the norm—is a recent invention dating back only to late-eighteenth-century Europe, yet has become a dominant, if overlooked, structuring principle of modernity. According to this paradigm, individuals are imagined to be able to think and feel properly only in one language, their “mother tongue,” while multiple languages are seen as a threat to the cohesion of individuals and communities, institutions and disciplines. The book argues that since reemergent multilingual forms and practices exist in tension with the paradigm, they need to be analyzed as “postmonolingual,” that is, as marked by the continuing force of monolingualism. Focused on canonical and minority writers working in German in the twentieth century, the individual chapters examine distinct forms of multilingualism: writing in one socially unsanctioned “mother tongue” about another language (Franz Kafka); mobilizing words of foreign derivation as part of a multilingual constellation within one language (Theodor W. Adorno); producing an oeuvre in two separate languages simultaneously (Yoko Tawada); writing by literally translating from the “mother tongue” into another language (Emine Sevgi Özdamar); and mixing different languages, codes, and registers within one text (Feridun Zaimoğlu). These analyses suggest that the dimensions of gender, kinship, and affect encoded in the “mother tongue” are crucial to the persistence of monolingualism and the challenge of multilingualism.

Nothing says more about a culture than the way it responds to deeply traumatic events. The Reign of Terror, America's Civil War, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Kennedy assassination, September 11th—watershed moments such as these can be rich sounding boards for the cultural historian patient enough to tease out the traumatic event's complex cultural resonances. This book is about one such moment in the history of modern France. The so-called Terrible Year began with the French army's crushing defeat at Sedan and the fall of the Second Empire in September of 1870, followed by the Prussian occupation of France and first siege of Paris in the fall and winter of that year. But no event of the period proved as deeply traumatic as the Paris Commune of 1871 and the bloody reprisals that attended its demise. This book examines the conundrum of why French literary, historical and philosophical texts written in the aftermath of the Paris Commune so often employ the trope of confusion (in both the phenomenal and cognitive senses of that term) to register and work through the historical traumas of the Terrible Year? And how might these representations of confusion both reflect and inflect the confusions inherent to an ongoing process of social upheaval evident in late nineteenth-century France—a process whose benchmarks include democratization and the blurring of social classes, a persistent and evolving revolutionism, radical reconfigurations of the city as lived environment, and the development of specifically capitalist logics of commerce?

It has become commonplace to claim that, as imagined communities, nations are constituted through the incitement of feelings and the operations of fantasy. But what about the state? Can we think of it as a subject of feeling, as well? This study of late Victorian culture argues that novels certainly did. Revisiting major works by Olive Schreiner, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, and Sarah Grand, among others, it shows how novels dramatized the feelings and fantasies of a culture that was increasingly optimistic, as well as increasingly anxious, about the state's capacity to “step in” and help its citizens achieve the good life. In particular, this book tracks the historical emergence of a fantasy of the state as a heroic actor with whom one has a relationship and from whom one desires something. This fantasy can be seen as a psychic response to the nineteenth-century triangulation of sovereignty, discipline, and biopower, the three modes of power that concerned Michel Foucault. While this fantasy radiated across genres, novels became a privileged site for meditating on its more tragic implications. In the novels discussed here, the central tragedy arises from the painful condition of individuals' imagining themselves to be independent of power-bearing institutions, yet knowing, consciously or unconsciously, that they are not, and may not even wish to be. Discussing novels set in the rural, urban, and imperial locations of Britain, The Dream Life of Citizens illuminates this enduring ambivalence at the heart of the liberal subject's relationship to state power.

Though Irish contributions to literary modernism are well known, Irish modernism tends to be framed through narrow treatments of Joyce, Yeats, and the Revival as “cosmopolitan” writers detached from a wider Irish intellectual and cultural history and a consideration of Irish literature’s role in modernism’s ongoing development. Empire’s Wake significantly broadens conventional understandings of Irish modernism and postmodernism by tracing how a distinctly postcolonial late modernism emerges within Irish literature between the late 1920s and the 1950s to contest and extend key aspects of modernist thought and aesthetic innovation at the very moment that high modernism is consolidating its influence and prestige. Countering critical portraits of the era as one of aesthetic stagnation, the book argues that a late modernist sensibility animates postcolonial Irish writing across a range of literary registers running from the Gaelic autobiographies of the remote Blasket Islands to Samuel Beckett’s radical re-imaginings of the modern novel. Continuing, then, to resituate Irish modernism and postmodernism within the contexts of the lively political, intellectual, and cultural debates marking Irish postcoloniality’s distinct phases from the 1920s to the 1990s “Celtic Tiger” era, the book draws on the work of Samuel Beckett, Sean O’Faoláin, Frank McCourt and the Blasket autobiographers to complicate and enhance our assessments of the legacies of Joyce and the Revival and challenge conventional notions of a singular “global modernism” emerging in the aftermath of empire.

Enlightened Sentiments reassesses the eighteenth century's liberal legacies by revisiting the wide-ranging development of eighteenth-century letters known as “sentimentalism.” It suggests that the recent retrieval of sentimentalism as a predominantly affective culture of sensibility elides its critical motif of moral and aesthetic judgment, and obscures the movement's contributions to one of the Enlightenment's most important, and in recent times, contentious norms—the ideal of autonomy. Drawing upon novelists from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen, and theorists of judgment from David Hume to Hannah Arendt, the study contends that sentimental judgment complicates long-standing interpretations of liberal ethics as grounded in the opposition of reason and feeling, and autonomy and sociability. As such, sentimental literature and philosophy implies a powerful counter-challenge to postmodernist critiques of modernity as the harbinger principally of instrumentalist reason and disciplinary power.

This book is a study of gender, dynastic politics, and intertextuality in medieval and renaissance chivalric epic, focusing on Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso (1516–1532). Relying on the direct study of manuscripts and incunabula, it challenges the fixed distinction between medieval and early modern texts and reclaims medieval popular epic as a key source for the Furioso. Tracing the formation of the character of the warrior woman, from the Amazon to Bradamante, the book analyzes the process of gender construction in early modern Italy. By reading the tension between the representations of women as fighters, lovers, and mothers, it shows how the warrior woman is a symbolic center for the construction of legitimacy in the complex web of fears and expectations of the Northern Italian Renaissance court.

The living and the dead cohabited Paris until the late eighteenth century, when, in the name of public health, measures were taken to drive the deceased from the city. Cemeteries were removed from urban space, and corpses began to be viewed as terrifyingly noxious substances. The dead had fallen victim to a sustained new reflection on the notions of life and death that emerged from the two new medical fields of biology and hygiene. In large part, the Paris of the nineteenth century, the Paris of modernity, arose, both theoretically and physically, out of this concern over the relations between the animate and the inanimate. But as the dead became a source of pervasive and intense anxiousness, they also became an object of fascination that at once exceeded and guided the medical imagination which tried to control them. This book examines that exuberant anxiety to discover the irrational, indeed erotic, forces motivating the medicalization of death. Working across a broad range of disciplines including history, literature, the visual arts, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, it seeks to understand the meaning of the dead and their role in creating one of the most important cities of the contemporary world.

Focusing on major authors and problems from the Italian fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, from Petrarch and Boccaccio to Machiavelli, Ariosto and Tasso, this book examines the unstable dialectic of “reality” and “imagination,” as well as “history” and “literature.” The book identifies and interprets the ways in which literary texts are shaped by and serve the purposes of multiple, intertwined historical contexts, and it equally probes the function of such texts in constructing, interpreting, critiquing, and effacing the histories in which they are embedded. Throughout, the book poses the theoretical and methodological question of how formal analysis and literary forms can at once resist and further the historicist enterprise. Along the way the book interrogates the mechanisms of historical periodization that have governed for so long our study of what is sometimes called the “Renaissance,” sometimes the early modern period. It also addresses the period's own unstable version of the literature/history opposition, the place of gendered discourse in the construction of historical narratives (and vice versa), the elaborate formal strategies by which poets and intellectuals negotiate their relations to power, and, finally, the way in which proper names (of authors, works, and exemplary characters) serve as points of negotiation between individual identity and social order in the Renaissance.

A study of the theory and practice of seventeenth-century Dutch group portraits, this book offers an account of the genre's comic and ironic features, which it treats as comments on the social context of portrait sitters who are husbands and householders as well as members of civic and proto-military organizations. The introduction picks out anomalous touches with which Rembrandt problematizes standard group-portrait motifs in The Night Watch: a shooter who fires his musket into the company; two girls who appear to be moving through the company in the wrong direction; guardsmen who appear to be paying little or no attention to their leader's enthusiastic gesture of command. Were the patrons and sitters aware of or even complicit in staging the anomalies? If not, did the painter get away with a subversive parody of militia portrait conventions at the sitters' expense? Parts One and Two respond to these questions at several levels: first, by analyzing the aesthetic structure of group portraiture as a genre; second, by reviewing the conflicting accounts modern scholars give of the civic guard company as an institution; third, by marking the effect on civic guardsmen of a mercantile economy that relied heavily on wives and mothers to keep the home fires burning. Two phenomena persistently recur in the portraits under discussion: competitive posing and performance anxiety. Part Three studies these phenomena in portraits of married couples and families. Finally, Part Four examines them in The Night Watch in the light of the first three parts.

The Pain of Reformation examines a constellation of masculinity, vulnerability, and ethics in the tradition of heroic poetry in Renaissance England. While many understand representations of masculinity to be direct reflections of cultural definitions of manliness or the triumphant expression of nationalist and proto-imperial ideologies, for some the discourses of masculinity and virtue provided opportunities to reflect on the ethics of responding to bodily and cultural vulnerability in the wake of the Reformation. This book argues that the most illuminating meditation on vulnerability, masculinity, and ethics in the wake of the Reformation came from Spenser, a poet often associated with the brutalities of English rule in Ireland. The underside, or shadow, of violence in both the fantasies and the realities of Spenser's England was a corresponding contemplation of the nature of the precarious lives of subjects in post-Reformation England. Spenser's 1590 Faerie Queene opens with a gesture of disarmament consonant with early modern allegories of peace in which Venus, or Love, disarms Mars, or War. The poem explores the possibility that vulnerability was a solution to, not merely an unfortunate consequence of, real and imagined forms of violence. From this meditation on what it means to be vulnerable to harm emerges a capacious exploration of an ethics emerging from a series of necessary vulnerabilities to affect, bodily sensation, and sympathy for others.

Political Magic examines British fictions of exploration and colonialism from 1650 to 1750, arguing that narratives of intercultural contact reimagine political categories such as sovereignty and popular power. These fictions refigure the commoner as a superstitious savage encountering Britons as civilizing sovereigns. Authors of these narratives use the colonial scene as a political allegory; just as the sovereign is in some sense exterior to the legal order, so is the colonist exterior to the colonized. These fictions reveal aspects of political thought in this period that official discourse shunted aside-particularly the status of common folk as political subjects, whose “liberty” was proclaimed even as it was undermined in theory and in practice. Political Magic traces fictional efforts to manage these tensions. These texts repeatedly focalize moments of savage wonder, in which “uncivilized” people stand astonished when first witnessing European displays of technological prowess, particularly gunpowder. This repeated motif--the “first gunshot topos”--performs important conceptual work on ideas of consent and political legitimacy. Wonder induces admiration, and admiration transforms the unruly savage into a docile subject. However, as manifestations of force held in abeyance, these technologies also signal the reliance of sovereigns on extreme violence as the foundation of their authority. By examining works by Margaret Cavendish, Daniel Defoe, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, and Eliza Haywood in conjunction with political writing and travelogues, Political Magic locates a subterranean discourse of sovereignty in the century after Hobbes, finding surprising affinities between the government of “savages” and of Britons.

Beginning with Kant, German idealist philosophers undertake a radical rethinking of the nature of human mindedness whose ramifications have yet to be fully assessed. At the heart of this project is the claim that the mind is fundamentally active and self-determining. In the wake of this innovation, it becomes difficult to account for the central fact that humans’ orientation in the world depends on culturally transmitted models of acting, feeling, and thinking. If the defining feature of the mind is self-induced activity, how much room, if any, remains for receptive openness toward the world of artefacts and meanings made by our fellow humans? This book shows that the need to avoid an antinomy between the claims of spontaneous activity and the indispensability of cultural transmission was a key driving force of idealist thought. Spanning the period from Kant to Hegel, the book examines the ways in which the German idealists envisioned and enacted cultural transmission. In chapters focusing on aesthetic experience, the historical character of philosophy, textual communication, and literary criticism, the book presents a series of interrelated attempts at understanding the conjunction of receptivity and spontaneous activity in the transmission of human-made models of mindedness. The book combines a reconstructive approach to the idealist legacy with attention to subsequent intellectual developments to argue that we cannot hope to keep our bearings in the contemporary intellectual landscape without the conceptual framework established by the idealists.

This book is about representations of sodomy. While most of the texts it considers are literary — works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, among others — it is framed by political considerations, notably the 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Bowers v. Hardwick that denied any constitutional act to private consensual acts that the court termed “homosexual sodomy” and the rhetoric attaching sodomy to Saddam Hussein in the initial U.S. war in Iraq. The book takes as axiomatic Foucault's description of sodomy as “that utterly confused category.” Without collapsing questions of historical difference, it works to articulate relations between the early modern period and our own, between a time before the homo/heterosexual divide and the modern regimes that assume it. In this book, sodometries (a Renaissance word for “sodomy” chosen for its nonce-word suggestiveness) are sites of complications around definitions of sex and gender. Because “sodomy” is not a term capable of singular definition, representations of sodomy are never direct. Sodomy exists only relationally. Three social domains for textual production are explored in this book: the sixteenth-century English court as the location of high literariness; the theater, especially as a site for controversy around cross-dressing; the New World as the place where the slaughter of native populations (and, in New England, of Englishmen as well) was carried out in the name of ridding the hemisphere of sodomites. These lethal impulses are read as foundational for a U.S. imaginary still operative in many powerful quarters.

This book focuses on the ways in which a number of French literary narratives written in the realist tradition show a dynamic balance between the desire of the author/narrator to present a verisimilar world and the need for aesthetic balance. While the works studied — narratives by Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Colette, Proust, and Sartre — range over the course of a century, from 1835 to 1938, they share a perspective on the relations between and the need to engage questions of realist verisimilitude and narrative interest and aesthetics. The book discusses some of the subversive paths taken in realism and, specifically, in canonical narratives solidly anchored in the tradition. The goal here is to analyze these realist texts, regardless of the narrative mode chosen, in order to see the deviations and detours from realism, mostly for aesthetic ends.

This book investigates Shakespeare's King Lear and its originative power in modern literature with specific attention to the early work of English Romantic poet William Wordsworth and to the American writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans. It examines how these later readers return to the play to interrogate emphatically the question of the relations between literature and politics in modernity and to initiate in this way their own creative trajectories. King Lear opens up a literary genealogy or history of successors, at the heart and origin of which, the author claims, is a crisis of sovereignty. The tragedy famously begins with the title character's decision to give up his throne and divide the kingdom prior to his demise. In bringing to light the assumptions behind this logic, and in dramatizing its disastrous consequences, the play performs an implicit analysis and critique of sovereignty as the guiding principle of political life and gestures, beyond sovereignty, towards the possibility of a new aesthetic and political future. The question of the relations between literature and politics does not only open up immanently or internally within King Lear, this book argues, but is also that which occasions a literary history of readers who return to the play as to an originary locus for dealing with a problem.

Critically engaging the concept of the Mediterranean as a “liquid continent” (Gabriel Audisio), the book argues in favor of a “transcontinental” heuristic model that rests on the transmaritime deployment of the Maghreb within the millennia-old relation that has materially and culturally bound it to multiple Mediterranean sites. Studying a Mediterranean-inspired body of texts from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Gibraltar in French, Arabic, and Spanish, the book delivers provocative analyses that complicate the dichotomy between nation and Mediterranean, the valence of the postcolonial topos of nomadism in the face of postcolonial trauma, and conceptions of the Mediterranean as a mythical site averse to historical realization. The book substitutes a trans-Mediterranean reading of Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma as allegory of the Maghreb’s long-standing plurality for Albert Camus’ colonialist Mediterranean utopia. Through this adjusted Mediterranean genealogy, it reveals the intersection of these Mediterranean imaginaries with Maghrebi claims to an inclusive, democratic national ideal yet to be realized. Attuned to both the perpetual fluctuation of the Mediterranean as method and the political imperatives specific to the postcolonial Maghreb, the transcontinental reveals the limits of models of hybridity and nomadism oblivious to material realities. Through a sustained reflection on the potential and limitations of allegory and critical melancholia, the book shows how the Mediterranean successfully decenters postcolonial nation-building projects and mediates the nomadic subject’s reinsertion into a revised national collective respectful of heterogeneity. These far-reaching adjustments to our readings of the Maghreb and the Mediterranean help us rethink not just the space of the sea, the hybridity it produced, and the way it shaped historical dynamics (globalization, imperialism, decolonization, and nationalism) but also the very nature of postcolonial histories and identities along its shores.

Eighteenth-century France witnessed the rise of matter itself—in forms ranging from atoms to anatomies—as a privileged object of study. This book redefines what is at stake in the emergence of an enlightened secular materialism by showing how questions of figure—How should a body be represented? What should the effects of this representation be on readers?—are tellingly and consistently located at the very heart of 18th-century debates about the nature of material substance. French materialisms of the Enlightenment are crucially invested not only in the development of a sophisticated theoretical apparatus around the notion of matter but in the production of specific relationships between readers and the matter of the texts that they consume. How, the book asks, did the period's fascination with a markedly immaterial and ephemeral event —the reading of works of fiction—come to coincide with what appears to be a gradual materialization of human subjects: men and women who increasingly manage to envision themselves transfigured, as the century wears on, into machines, animals, and even, in the work of the Marquis de Sade, tables and chairs? In what way did the spread of new philosophies of matter depend upon the ability of readers to perceive certain figures of speech as literally and immediately true—to imagine themselves as fully material bodies even as they found themselves most deeply compelled by disembodied literary forms? More broadly, in what sense does the act of reading literature alter and transfigure our perceptions of what is, and can be, real?