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This dissertation discusses different forms of life, bare life and metamorphic being, and their relationship to identity and sovereignty. Taking Giorgio Agamben's concept of bare life and his discussion of happy life as a starting point, I argue that the potential inherent in the notion for changing out of the condition of bare life must be conceptualized as metamorphic being. Metamorphic being articulates the move from bare life to happy life and bridges the gap between the two notions that Agamben's work has left open. But at the same time, metamorphic being also offers a more extended way of conceiving what Agamben calls happy life. I argue that the move from bare life to happy life, what I call "metamorphic being," is in itself post-sovereign happiness that escapes sovereign politics and reconfigures individual agency as a strange passive-active practice of bodily presence that is entirely sufficient. Metamorphic being is a paradoxical experience of both a state of being and a transformative process that arises out of that state. Taking its cue from both literary metamorphosis, where two opposite poles of a metaphor are molded into one sign and biological metamorphosis, where it signifies a transformation from one species into another, metamorphic being challenges unitary concepts of species and individual identity. I examine texts that traverse the realms through which humanity has distinguished itself from other species–politics, rational thought and language–and in which metamorphic being becomes manifest, even though the term itself does not appear in them. On the face of it these texts are about bare life, but upon closer examination they demonstrate how bare life complicates biological life and changes into a state of continuous transformation: metamorphic being. First, I show how Nazi ideology's ideal of a perfect human form has concomitantly produced the fear of beings that threaten to dissolve this form by formlessness. Nazism externalized this fear and produced 'the Jew' as metamorph. Second, I explicate the connection in Giorgio Agamben's work between his notions of bare life and happy life, being-in-potentiality and profanation. I argue that my term of metamorphic being begins to conceptualize that link by offering a way to avoid the logic of inclusive exclusion, on which both sovereignty and bare life are predicated. Metamorphic being emerges as a practice of being-in-potentiality that reconceptualizes bare life into metamorphic being and represents happy life. Third, I further elaborate metamorphic being as the agency of bodily presence through Coetzee's novels Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man. Metamorphic being in those novels appears as a sort of passive-active 'choice' for a solitary yet sufficient way of being. This 'choice' does not resemble intentional action, however, but simply happens. It is a 'choice' for just being there, being alive. Finally, I argue that Kafka's story The Metamorphosis represents not just metamorphic being as literary metamorphosis but that it relies on biological metamorphosis as well. The embodiment of metamorphic being, which humans share with all other beings, is bound up in natural cycles of growth and decay, embedded in political, philosophical or literary designs. Kafka's story represents two versions of metamorphic being: Gregor's transformation into a bug and Grete's metamorphosis into a mature woman through Gregor's decay and death. Metamorphic being emerges as a practice that brings into focus what all living beings have in common: life in all its constantly mutating forms.
This book is a comparative study of masculinity and white racial identity in Irish nationalism and Zionism. It analyses how both national movements sought to refute widespread anti-Irish or anti-Jewish stereotypes and create more prideful (and highly gendered) images of their respective nations. Drawing on English-, Irish-, and Hebrew-language archival sources, Aidan Beatty traces how male Irish nationalists sought to remake themselves as a proudly Gaelic-speaking race, rooted both in their national past as well as in the spaces and agricultural soil of Ireland. On the one hand, this was an attempt to refute contemporary British colonial notions that they were somehow a racially inferior or uncomfortably hybridised people. But this is also presented in the light of the general history of European nationalism; nationalist movements across Europe often crafted romanticised images of the nation’s past and Irish nationalism was thus simultaneously European and postcolonial. It is this that makes Irish nationalism similar to Zionism, a movement that sought to create a more idealized image of the Jewish past that would disprove contemporary anti-Semitic stereotypes.
This work is a study of Jewish cultural memory as exemplified by rabbinic midrash of the Amoraic period, the second through fifth centuries of the Common Era, and especially midrash on the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac (Gen. 22:1-19). The Akedah is proposed and analyzed as a model for submission to the divine will through the act of interpretation. Rabbinic sages constructed a framework for cultural memory that relies on mimetic acts of interpretive substitution that are employed to confront, interpret, and remember ruptures as evidence of divine care, and they found, in the Akedah, a model for this interpretive stance. The form of memory they devised, termed midrashic memory, is proposed as inherent to rabbinic textual interpretation and whose origins are traced to the Akedah narrative itself. Midrashic memory is analyzed in selections from Amoraic midrash, in Shalom Spiegel's twentieth-century masterwork on the Akedah, The Last Trial, and is proposed as the crux of a theory and taxonomy of Jewish memory. Second Slayings analyzes the Akedah as a metonym for cultural reorientation through the reharmonization of the lived ('temporal') and the covenanted ( 'anamnestic') planes of experience.
The central event in Hilde's childhood occurred on 2 February 1945. She was a confused but compliant girl at the time. Now she is a depressed and angry old woman, who is haunted by the memory of that shameful day. For on that day in February, the ordinary citizens of her village hunted down and murdered approximately 500 prisoners who had escaped from the concentration camp in Mauthausen. This brilliant novel renders the experiences of common people caught up in the political cyclone of the time, reminding us that history is not behind us, nor is it outside us.
The twelfth-century French poet Chrétien de Troyes is a major figure in European literature. His courtly romances fathered the Arthurian tradition and influenced countless other poets in England as well as on the continent. Yet because of the difficulty of capturing his swift-moving style in translation, English-speaking audiences are largely unfamiliar with the pleasures of reading his poems. Now, for the first time, an experienced translator of medieval verse who is himself a poet provides a translation of Chrétien’s major poem, Yvain, in verse that fully and satisfyingly captures the movement, the sense, and the spirit of the Old French original. Yvain is a courtly romance with a moral tenor; it is ironic and sometimes bawdy; the poetry is crisp and vivid. In addition, the psychological and the socio-historical perceptions of the poem are of profound literary and historical importance, for it evokes the emotions and the values of a flourishing, vibrant medieval past.
Absurdist fiction is a genre of fictional narrative (traditionally, literary fiction), most often in the form of a novel, play, poem, or film, that focuses on the experiences of characters in situations where they cannot find any inherent purpose in life, most often represented by ultimately meaningless actions and events that call into question the certainty of existential concepts such as truth or value. The critic Augst Nemo selected seven short stories of the absurd for his appreciation: - A Country Doctor by Franz Kafka - In the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka - Before the Law by Franz Kafka - Ex Oblivione by H. P. Lovecraft - Andrey Semyonovich by Daniil Kharms - A sonnet by Daniil Kharms - Symphony no. 2 by Daniil Kharms For more books with interesting themes, be sure to check the other books in this collection!
Kafka's Creatures: Animals, Hybrids, and Other Fantastic Beings is an interdisciplinary collection of essays on Franz Kafka's use of non-human creatures in his writings. It is written from a variety of interpretive perspectives and highlights diverse ways of understanding how Kafka's use of these creatures illuminate his work in general.
What Hemingway's A Moveable Feast did for Paris in the 1920s, this charming yet undeceivable memoir does for Greenwich Village in the late 1940s. In 1946, Anatole Broyard was a dapper, earnest, fledgling avant-gardist, intoxicated by books, sex, and the neighborhood that offered both in such abundance. Stylish written, mercurially witty, imbued with insights that are both affectionate and astringent, this memoir offers an indelible portrait of a lost bohemia. We see Broyard setting up his used bookstore on Cornelia Street—indulging in a dream that was for him as romantic as “living off the land or sailing around the world” while exercizing his libido with a protegee of Anais Nin and taking courses at the New School, where he deliberates on “the new trends in art, sex, and psychosis.” Along the way he encounters Delmore Schwartz, Caitlin and Dylan Thomas, William Gaddis, and other writers at the start of their careers. Written with insight and mercurial wit, Kafka Was the Rage elegantly captures a moment and place and pays homage to a lost bohemia as it was experienced by a young writer eager to find not only his voice but also his place in a very special part of the world.
A schoolteacher tells her class a fable about a princess who promises her hand in marriage to a dog that has licked her bottom clean. Strangely, a doglike suitor then appears to court the teacher. Much to the chagrin of her friends, an odd romance ensues - simmering with secrets, chivalry, and sex.
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