Gabriel Josipovici Research Articles

Литературно-музыкальный синтез в современной зарубежной литературе: творчество И.С. Баха как urtext

The article presents the results of the analytical work with the verbal texts of modern foreign prosaists, poets and Johann Sebastian Bach’s music texts. Inn the opinion of the authors of the research, through centuries, works by Bach inspire representatives of different branches of art to look for new instruments for achieving intermediavity of art works and a high level of its synesthesia. One of the basic categories in the context of synthesis of arts is “musicality” as a reflection of the processes of using traditional music instruments and techniques while creating literary texts. Bach’s works themselves turn out to be a very important step in the development of the tradition of literary-music synthesis - Bach used the means, firstly, of musical rhetoric baroque to gain such synthesis. An even more interesting fact is that the very heritage of Bach appeared to be one of the most popular “objects” of musical-ization of the literary text. In the analyzed works of William Coales, Gabriel Josipovici, Richard Powers, Thomas Bernhard, George Tabori, Dieter Thomas Kuhn, Nancy Huston, Anna Enquist, the authors of the article discover Bach’s forebasis, a kind of an urtext, that allows considering the mentioned literary texts to be a highly representative material for solving the problems of the synthetic character of the art culture of the 21st century that indeed requires a deep reflection. Among the results of today’s exponential development of electronic technologies, there exists one important factor in the realization of art peoples’ centuries-old expectations - the forming of the possibility for the emergence (rather massive already) ofworks of art whose creation would involve different types and art forms. On the one hand, this factor makes it necessary to analyze the historical perspective, the evolution of the methods and models of synthesis of arts some authors create; on the other, however paradoxical it may seem, it seems to give a new impulse to experiments of writers, musicians, artists, who try, even remaining in general within the “traditional” boundaries of the types of their art (literature, music, art consequently), to actively use artistic means traditional for these types of art for achieving the effect of crossing the boundaries of “only” literature, music or art. This trend seems to be particularly noticeable in modern European literature. The aim of the given article is to identify the specific instruments of modern foreign prosaists who choose Bach’s music texts as the urtexts of their literary works. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

Trust and Suspicion: Gabriel Josipovici on Shakespeare and Modernity

<p>Celem artykułu jest ukazanie pracy Gabriela Josipovici zatytułowanej On Trust: Art and the Temptation of Suspicion (1999) jako cennego wkładu we współczesne rozważania nad afektem oraz kształtowaniem się post-postmodernistycznej postawy odrzucającej wątpienie. Wybitny brytyjski pisarz, dramaturg i krytyk Josipovici podejmuje próbę charakterystyki kultur przednowoczesnych oraz świata nowoczesnego za pomocą dwóch kontrastowych postaw emocjonalnych: ufności i wątpienia. Artykuł przedstawia tę część rozważań autora, która dotyczy istotnego momentu w historii świata, kiedy to uczucie wątpienia zaczyna dominować w kulturze. Stąd koncentracja na wyłanianiu się nowoczesności w renesansie, znajdujące odzwierciedlenie w utworach Szekspira, które wskazują na napięcie między ufnością i wątpieniem tworzące się w kontekście humanizmu i protestantyzmu. Próbie rekonstrukcji myśli przewodniej On Trust towarzyszą odniesienia do innych utworów Gabriela Josipovici, takich jak: Writing and the Body (1982), The Book of God (1988), What Ever Happened to Modernism? (2010) i Hamlet: Fold on Fold (2016). Dzięki odwołaniom do innych prac Josipovici udowodniono, że perspektywa ufności i wątpienia jest stale obecna w myśli krytycznej autora.</p>

Between or Beyond? Jewish British Short Stories in English since the 1970s

Looking at short stories by writers as diverse as Brian Glanville, Ruth Fainlight, Clive Sinclair, Jonathan Wilson, James Lasdun, Gabriel Josipovici, Tamar Yellin, Michelene Wandor, and Naomi Alderman, and extending from the center of Jewish British writing to its margins, this article seeks to locate the defining feature of their ‘Jewish substratum’ in conditions particular to the Jewish post-war experience, and to trace its impact across their thematic plurality which, for the most part, transcends any specifically British concerns that may also emerge, opening up an Anglophone sphere of Jewish writing. More specifically, it is argued that the unease pervading so many Jewish British short stories since the 1970s is a product of, and response to, what may very broadly be described as the Jewish experience and the precarious circumstances of Jewish existence even after the Second World War and its cataclysmic impact. It is suggested that it is prompted in particular by the persistence of the Holocaust and the anxieties the historical event continues to produce; by the confrontation with competing patterns of identification, with antisemitism, and with Israel; and by anxieties of non-belonging, of fragmentation, of dislocation, and of dissolution. Turned into literary tropes, these experiences provide the basis of a Jewish substratum whose articulation is facilitated by the expansion of Jewish British writers into the space of Anglophone Jewish writing. As a result, the Jewish British short story emerges as a multifaceted and hybrid project in continuous progress.

How Jewish Refugee Critics Changed British Literary Criticism, 1970–2020

During the mid- and late 20th century, a small group of Jewish refugee critics changed the way British culture thought about what kind of literature mattered and why. These outsiders went on to have an enormous impact on late 20th-century British literary culture. What was this impact? Why in the last third of the 20th century? Why did British literary culture become so much more receptive to critics like George Steiner, Gabriel Josipovici, Martin Esslin and SS Prawer and to a new canon of continental Jewish writers? The obstacles to Jewish refugee critics were formidable. Yet their work on writers like Kafka, Brecht and Paul Celan, and thinkers like Heidegger and Lukacs had a huge impact. They also broke the post-war silence about the Holocaust and moved the Jewish Bibl from the margins of English-speaking culture.

"We need to rediscover the living body" : Gabriel Josipovici's metamodern project in Goldberg: Variations

"We need to rediscover the living body" : Gabriel Josipovici's metamodern project in Goldberg: Variations

Gabriel Josipovici and The Book of God

There are many approaches to reading the Hebrew Bible, from the pietistic in both Jewish and Christian traditions to the scholarly. Gabriel Josipovici’s approach is not about seeking the reductive ‘meaning’ of a text, but encouraging readers into an open relationship with the text in order to preserve the ambiguities and mysteries that adhere to such texts. Joseph’s encounter with an unnamed stranger in Genesis 37 is used as an illustration of this approach. Standing ‘face to face’ with the text requires humility, and trust in the storyteller.

Editorial

Gabriel Josipovici first contributed to European Judaism during its third year of publication in the Summer 1968 issue. In his role as Managing Editor, Rabbi Michael Goulston z’l sought to use the journal to provide, among other things, a place for outreach and dialogue between those who represented the religious leadership of the Jewish people, in this case rabbis of his own generation who belonged to ‘progressive’ movements in the UK, and Jewish ‘intellectuals’ perceived as being alienated from, indifferent to or somewhat marginal within their own Jewish tradition. Thus, the same issue includes the proceedings of a symposium on ‘Judaism and Marxism: The First European Dialogue’.

The Significance of Shakespeare in Gabriel Josipovici’s Work

The present article seeks to analyse the place of Shakespeare’s work within the oeuvre of Gabriel Josipovici, starting with the latter’s first published critical book, The World and the Book, and ending with his most recent, Hamlet: Fold on Fold. In the early work Josipovici sought to establish a direct line between the Middle Ages and Modernism, yet Shakespeare was already a presence whose plays obliged that line to deviate. In his later critical work, such as On Trust, Shakespeare becomes one of the figures who allows Josipovici to exemplify clearly the crucial gap he wishes to explore between saying and doing. This gap is most fully explored in the recent book on Hamlet, where the protagonist is seen as the supreme literary example of what happens when the traditions governing doing have fallen away, leaving the character adrift in a sea of possibilities of utterance and action, none of which has the feel of necessity.

Gabriel Josipovici

This article explores three central figures that recur in Gabriel Josipovici’s critical writing. All three are essentially solitary. First, there is the creative figure – the artist, the composer, the writer – alone in their study or studio. Second, there is a curiously impersonal figure, more elusive, harder to pin down. Not the writer or artist but an anonymous figure walking down the road, Wordsworth’s solitaries in The Prelude and Paul Klee’s Wander-Artist. And, finally, there are Jewish figures, especially from Kafka and the Hebrew Bible. What are these bare, elusive anonymous figures doing in Josipovici’s writing? Why do they come up so often, throughout his work, from the mid 1970s to the present? And are they lifeless or are they full of life, deeply human, rooted in history and literature?

Gabriel Josipovici at 75

This article, as a tribute to Gabriel Josipovici, describes his impact on the author over many decades, initially as his teacher and thesis supervisor, later as colleague and friend at the University of Sussex. This impact included broadening his knowledge of contemporary French literary critics and of writers engaged with criticism, and opening up European dimensions to otherwise insular English academic approaches to literature. A study of Josipovici’s novel Migrations (1977) shows how it manages to explore the many dimensions of the condition of migrancy, even though held here within the bounds of a novel that is tightly packed but opens into a whole world.

Introduction

In this brief introduction to the Symposium to celebrate the 75th birthday of Gabriel Josipovici, held at the University of Sussex on 10 September 2016, the author recalls his first meeting with Gabriel during the 1960s, when literary criticism was dominated by a particular English perspective. As a cultural outsider, Gabriel introduced new approaches, particularly from France, that became part of transformative changes to the discipline as taught at the university.

Vegetating Life and the Spirit of Modernism in Kafka and Beckett

Vegetating Life and the Spirit of Modernism in Kafka and Beckett Joseph Anderton (bio) Belatedness and recommencement are inherent to modernism’s pursuit of the now and the new. As an artistic sensibility dedicated to the ephemeral and elusive flux of modernity, modernism can be conceived as a contradictory spirit that enacts an auto-defeating and therefore auto-sustaining rapid cycle of attempt and failure, purpose and obsolescence. In this essay I argue that the unachievable, self-perpetuating aspiration that modernism contains is refigured as despondent, late modern “vegetating life” in the works of two limit-modernists, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. Despite producing the bulk of their most memorable work over thirty years apart, both Kafka and Beckett repeatedly offer comparable expressions of endlessness—through purgatorial narrative conditions encapsulated by the continuous recontextualization of deictic language—that resonate with the inevitable belatedness and creative recommencement of modernism. Although deictic language is not especially frequent in Kafka or Beckett, it acquires great significance in their evocations of “vegetation,” an underexplored state identified by critics such as Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno that encompasses a series of related binaries: activity and stasis, desire and passivity, life and death. In Kafka’s protoform and Beckett’s later-form, each writer conveys what Shane Weller calls the “paradoxical experience of endless ending, an experience that is alien to the Enlightenment conception of progress that underlines the powerful myth of modernity, and that lies at the heart of the late modernist conception of history.”1 Through portrayals of such interminable vegetative states, Kafka anticipates and Beckett epitomizes a virtually exhausted [End Page 805] late modernist life, undergoing the throes of modernism’s drive for novelty and immediacy while subject to the pervasive negativity and failure that replace the possibility of achievement. If modernism’s intrinsic tardiness fuels its invention of ever-new forms, the lateness in late modernism manifests as futility, burden, and nostalgia. The vegetating life narratively and linguistically evident in Kafka’s “The Hunter Gracchus” (1917/1931) and Beckett’s Texts for Nothing (1950–51), for example, demonstrates the purgatorial condition of modernism habitually starting anew, and converts it into late modernism’s protracted ending. The Spirit of Modernism It is common for the critical distillation of discrepant modernisms to result in an elemental dynamic spirit that goes back to its etymological roots: modern, modo, “just now.” In his essay “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” first published in German in 1981, Jürgen Habermas portrays modernism as a persistent rebellion kicking against the normative past: “With a different content in each case, the expression ‘modernity’ repeatedly articulates the consciousness of an era that refers back to the past of classical antiquity precisely in order to comprehend itself as the result of a transition from the old to the new.”2 As an agent of change, modernism appears necessarily retrospective to disturb sedimented cultural traditions legitimately and repeatedly. Likewise, in an earlier 1967 essay, “The Culture of Modernism,” Irving Howe discerns the intense reactivity of modernism, arguing that “no matter what impasse it encounters in its clashes with the external world, modernism is ceaselessly active within its own realm, endlessly inventive in destruction and improvisation.”3 Howe accentuates the energetic versatility of the modernist spirit to the point of infinitude, underlining its restless originality in defiance of shifting historical contexts. More recently, Gabriel Josipovici summarizes his book Whatever Happened to Modernism? (2010) with the claim that modernism “will always be with us, for it is not primarily a revolution in diction, or a response to industrialisation or the First World War, but is art coming to a consciousness of its limitations and responsibilities.”4 Rather than a specific aesthetic, historical, or ideological understanding, Josipovici articulates the enduring spirit of modernism: a diffuse sense of modernist art as an aggressive, resistant dynamic. His present tense phrase, “coming to,” suggests that modernism is a continual process, one of reflection and renewal. Susan Stanford Friedman describes such conceptions of “modern/modernity/modernism” as the “relational definition” which “stresses the condition or sensibility of radical disruption and accelerating change wherever and whenever such a phenomenon appears, particularly if it manifests widely. What is modern or...

“You and I”: The Fragmentation of the Writing Self and the Tradition of Modernism in T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Gabriel Josipovici’s Moo Pak

This article undertakes as its subject the parodic relation between Gabriel Josipovici’s novel Moo Pak and T.S. Eliot’s debut and most famous poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Rewriting “Prufrock” into a new reality and a fictional mode becomes an occasion for Josipovici to question Eliot’s “Impersonal theory of poetry” and advance his own dialectical vision of the creative process as well as his Modernist aesthetics. Josipovici’s reinterpretation of Eliot’s youthful masterpiece shows both works as stories of artistic creation illustrating their authors’ critical convictions.

Passionate space: the philosophy of affect in Gabriel Josipovici’s Hotel Andromeda

Passionate space: the philosophy of affect in Gabriel Josipovici’s Hotel Andromeda

Modernity and Utopia in Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern and Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism

This article seeks to explore the relation between utopia and modernity on the basis of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) as well as two seminal contemporary studies: Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern (1992) and Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism? (2010). The ambiguous nature of the modern prototype of utopia which displays both the eutopian and the dystopian (self-critical) impulse seems reflected in the nature of modernity. With auto-criticism inscribed in the constitution of both utopia and modernity, the leading desires of the modern period—for a greater emancipation and domination—prove to be its greatest burden both in the socio-political sphere as well as in art and literature.

Speech, writing and the body in Gabriel Josipovici’s Hotel Andromeda

The aim of this article is to study Gabriel Josipovici’s dialogue style in his latest fiction, Hotel Andromeda (2014), in order to prove that the dialogue form is used to problematize significant theoretical issues in his writing, namely the problem of speech, writing and the body. The fact that speech and writing are embedded in the text in exactly the same way is an interesting feature of Josipovici’s novel which, against the long philosophical tradition originating in Plato’s dialogues, implies the equality of both means of expression. It seems that the common denominator the author finds for both media is the body which he smuggles into literature through the extensive use of dialogue and the characters’ fascination with the materiality of the written word.

The musical novel: imitation of musical structure, performance, and reception in contemporary fiction

What is a novel? This book defines the genre as musical not primarily in terms of its content, but in its form. The musical novel crosses medial boundaries, aspiring to techniques, structures, and impressions similar to those of music. It takes music as a model for its own construction, borrowing techniques and forms that range from immediately perceptible, essential aspects of music (rhythm, timbre, the simultaneity of multiple voices) to microstructural (jazz riffs, call and response, leitmotifs) and macrostructural elements (themes and variations, symphonies, albums). The musical novel also evokes the performance context by imitating elements of spontaneity that characterize improvised jazz or audience interaction. The Musical Novel builds upon theories of intermediality and semiotics to analyze the musical structures, forms, and techniques in two groups of musical novels, which serve as case studies. The first group imitates an entire musical genre and consists of jazz novels by Toni Morrison, Albert Murray, Xam Wilson Cartier, Stanley Crouch, Jack Fuller, Michael Ondaatje, and Christian Gailly. The second group of novels, by Richard Powers, Gabriel Josipovici, Rachel Cusk, Nancy Huston, and Thomas Bernhard, imitates a single piece of music, J. S. Bach's Goldberg Variations. Emily Petermann is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Konstanz.

“Revealing what cannot be spoken” – Gabriel Josipovici’s Short Stories as Illustrations of Transcendental Negativity

Cet article se concentre sur les nouvelles de Gabriel Josipovici et sur la weltanschauung qui s’y dégage et qui est imprégnée de ce que l’on pourrait appeler une « négativité transcendantale ». Bien que, historiquement, ces nouvelles soient ancrées dans le contexte de la postmodernité et de la déconstruction, elles témoignent du scepticisme et de la négativité avec une remarquable réticence. Elles outrepassent ce contexte par une « prise de distance par rapport à tout savoir » et révèlent « ce qui va au-delà des paroles » : l’expérience liminale de la mort, le mystère de l’identité humaine, le problème de l’accessibilité de l’Autre ainsi que le miracle de la créativité. L’article propose d’abord un sommaire des traits caractéristiques des nouvelles de Josipovici. Ensuite, trois textes sont analysés: “He” (1977), un récit qui s’auto-engendre («self-begetting»), constitue une bonne introduction à la poétique et à la weltanschauung de l’auteur ; ensuite, « Mobius the Stripper », qui est sa nouvelle la plus connue ; enfin, « The Reconstruction » (1974), texte analysé comme exemple de la tendance minimaliste de l’auteur. En conclusion, l’article offre un bref sommaire des récents développements qui sont survenus dans les nouvelles de Josipovici comme sa dernière collection, Heart’s Wings and Other Stories (2010).

Interview with Gabriel Josipovici

Photo: © Gabriel Josipovici (reproduced by kind permission of the author) MS: When did you start writing? Is there something you remember that sparked off your first texts? GJ: As far back as I can remember I wrote and wanted to write. When Monika Fludernik was going through my papers prior to writing her book about me, she came across a story in the Victoria College school magazine which I must have written when I was 13 or 14. I was shocked and amazed ...

“[A]ll comes alive and starts to dance”: The 29th Chapter of Gabriel Josipovici’s Goldberg: Variations

Cet article se donne pour objectif de déterminer le sens et la fonction du chapitre 29 de Goldberg: Variations de Gabriel Josipovici. À plusieurs égards, ce chapitre se démarque des autres parties du roman et requiert un commentaire à part. Nous démontrons que ce chapitre reprend le début du roman afin de figurer la joie de l’issue heureuse de la visite de Goldberg. D’une part, la scène de danse prend son sens en relation avec les chapitres 18 et 27 qui recourent à la métaphore de la « danse » afin de rendre compte de la libération que permettent la forme musicale de la fugue et la créativité. D’autre part, on peut démontrer l’affinité entre le chapitre 29 et la dernière variation de Bach. Josipovici propose un équivalent romanesque du quolibet de Bach. Tout comme la dernière variation de Bach est considérée comme le couronnement de la composition, le chapitre 29 peut être perçu comme le point culminant du roman.