Modern European Culture Research Articles

Between Noise and Harmony: The Oratorical Moment in the Musical Entanglements of Jews and Christians

250 A short version of this essay was delivered at the weekly colloquium of the Institute for Advanced Study—the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (WIKO)—in May 2005 as an account of my research project at the institute in 2004–5. The fruit of this project is planned to be published as a book entitled The Jew as an Aesthetic Category in Vocal Fiction: Musics of Sympathy, Alienation, and Redemption in Modern European Culture. Many members of the WIKO community enriched and inspired me during this year; unfortunately, I can mention only a few of them within the limits of this essay. I would like especially to thank Arnold Davidson, Yaron Ezrahi, Tom Mitchell, and Nita Schechet, as well as an anonymous reader, for valuable comments on the manuscript. Between Noise and Harmony: The Oratorical Moment in the Musical Entanglements of Jews and Christians

Alan Bullock, 1914–2004: “I Only Write Enormous Books”1

Alan Bullock (1914–2004) was one of Britain’s most distinguished scholars and the author of several extremely important books on recent and modern European civilization, history and culture. His enormous contribution to British, European, and Anglo-Saxon culture and historiography is easily discernible in his many books and essays. Chief among them his biography of Hitler, parallel study of Hitler and Stalin, three volume biography of Ernest Bevin, and the Fontana dictionaries of modern thought. One of Bullock’s greatest achievements was the establishment of St. Catherine’s College in Oxford University, at which he served as the Founding Master for more than a generation (1962–1990). Prior to WW II, recent European history was not considered a respectable research field worthy of serious academic work, nor was it thought that there existed the necessary distance from recent events for historians to deal with such history in a proper fashion. However, Alan Bullock’s books turned the study of modern and recent European history into the mainstream of postgraduate studies at Oxford. Lord Bullock contributed tremendously (together with Hugh Seton-Watson, Bill Deakin, Hugh Trevor-Roper and A. J. P. Taylor) to the breakthrough which turned contemporary history into a focus for academic research and teaching.

Fate-Generations and Generation Fates: Writers of Jewish Origin in Modern Hungarian Culture

In most European countries, the three big waves of modern European culture or of European modernity may also be viewed as the emerging and, from a historical perspective, the successful work of thr...

Francophonie et production littéraire nigérienne en traduction française : dialogue des cultures

This paper examines from the viewpoint of comparative literature the interaction between the French version of Nigerian literary production in English (source language) and Francophone African literature. It comprises two parts. The first part presents a critical appraisal of the French version of novels, poems and plays written by Nigerians, mostly those of the Nigeran pioneer writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Cyprian Ekwensi and Amos Tutuola. The study shows that translation into French (target language) makes it possible not only to promote the interaction between cultures within the framework of Francophonie in the global village, but also to project the Nigerian authors concerned and their writings on Francophonie's international literary scene, as well as to make significant contributions to the advancement of studies and research in comparative literature. The second part narrows down the discussion on cultural interactions to the relationship existing between two different African novels: Le Monde s'effondre,French version of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and L'Aventure ambigue,Cheikh Hamidou Kane's original text written in French. Emphasis is placed on the symbiotic relationship that should exist between traditional African and modern European cultures, as portrayed in a peculiar manner in both literary texts.

The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society; Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakh

<i>The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society</i>; Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakh

Bodily Extremes: the Role of Corporeality in the Shaping of Early Modern European Culture and Epistemology

Daniel Cottom. Cannibals and Philosophers. Bodies of Enlightenment (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Pp. 272. $50.00. Andrew Curran. Sublime Disorder. Physical Monstrosity in Diderot's Universe (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2001). Pp. 171. £35.00. Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg, eds. Bodily Extremities. Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2003). Pp. 235. $79.95. In recent years, the topic of corporeality has attracted wideattention spanningthe fields ofart, literature, cultural studies, history and philosophy. Studies in early modern Europe, and particularly in the Enlightenment, reflect this trend, forcingus to rethink many of our assumptions about the prevalence of the Cartesian tradition in Enlightenment thought. From various disciplinary vantage points and through the application of diverse methodological approaches,the three books reviewed here address the issue of the centrality of the body by focusing on its most extreme and unsettling expressions in early modern Europe (Egmond and Zwijnenberg), in the eighteenth century (Cottom) and more specifically in Diderot's work (Curran). Bodily Extremities is a collection of essays that attempts to give an interdisciplinary perspective on the cultural history of the human body in early modern Europe. As editors, Egmond and Zwijnenberg's stated goal is to avoid what they call "internalistic methodologies" that often characterize literary as well as art history studies and instead to foster,by crossing disciplinary boundaries, a reflection on these disciplinary categories themselves. As a result, the essays vary greatly in focus and methodology, yet all concentrate on bodily extremities with [End Page 323] four central themes connecting them: honor/shame, bodily integrity, identity, and pain. The volume includes several interesting articles, especially thoseby Daniela Bohde, Robert Zwijnenberg, Florike Egmond, Peter Mason and José Pardo Tomás. They warrant a closer look. Daniela Bohde's essay, "Skin and the Search for an Interior," concentrates on representations of flaying in the art and anatomy of the Cinquecento. Bohde examines several paintings and engravings representing the flaying of Marsyas. In doing so, she is able to very convincingly contrast Titian's painting (1570) with most other representations of the flaying, including Michelangelo's St Bartholemew from his Last Judgment (1534-41), that express a sixteenth-century conception of identity as covered or hidden by the skin which is considered a mere exterior. In opposition to that tradition, Titian represents the exterior and the interior as inextricably linked and skin as the bearer of identity and thus challenges the neo-platonic notion of self. But the most thought-provoking part of the essay resides in Bohde's interpretation of Titian's The Flaying of Marsyas as a representation of his very art of painting in layers, contradicting the disegno theory prevalent in his time. Thus "Titian pits not just two attitudes to the body against each other, but also two methods for producing art" (41). Like Bohde, Robert Zwijnenberg's reading of Leonardo da Vinci's late work, Saint John the Baptist, points to da Vinci's theory of the soul as inextricably linked to the body which is promoted to a position of prominence: "Painting is in the first place about expressing and evoking emotions, with the human body as its point of focus, and as its basis the tight relationship between soul and body, or inner and outer" (56). He argues that in this very controversial and ambiguous painting, Leonardo da Vinci experimented with the possibility of conflating a multiplicity of personae who exist in oppositional relationships, i.e., the triadJohn/Bacchus/Gabriel, or the man/woman dyad in the unity of one painted figure of the human body. Thus painting represented both the "borderless character of painting" and the "intellectual and artisanal experience of the self of the painter," making it into an "intellectual self-portrait" (67). Florike Egmond's historical essay, "Execution, Dissection, Pain and Infamy, A...

What Was Lost? The Czech Jewish Community

The Czech Jewish community exercised an influence on modern European culture quite disproportionate to its tiny size. Franz Kafka has become emblematic for a vanished world, but he was by no means the only Jew from the Czech lands who helped to shape modernity. Others included Gustav Mahler, Karl Kraus and Sigmund Freud, who unlike Kafka left their homeland, and grew to prominence in Vienna, the capital of the Habsburg Monarchy. At the turn of the century, Prague fostered a unique and complex symbiosis comprising Czech, German and Jewish culture, in which values promoted by one group, such as the protestant Jan Hus's belief in the power of Truth, still echoed by Václav Havel in 1989, came to be shared by others. The pluralist symbiosis that produced this achievement has been decimated. The destruction began in 1939–45 when the Germans destroyed the Jews, and was completed after 1945 when the Czechs expelled the Germans. What was lost? Before the Shoah, in 1936, the Prague Jewish community boasted 35,425 members. Today, that number has dwindled to around fifteen hundred souls. In other words, Prague Jewry has shrunk to under 5 percent of its pre-war total. The city now has four Orthodox Rabbis, who minister to about twenty devout Jews. The larger liberal reform movement does not even own a synagogue.

Beyond Tolerance and Persecution: Reassessing Our Approach to Medieval Convivencia

Beyond Tolerance and Persecution:Reassessing Our Approach to Medieval Convivencia Jonathan Ray (bio) In 1992, the quincentennial marking the expulsion of the Jews from Spain brought with it a flurry of studies on medieval Jewish, or Sephardic, civilization. In the succeeding dozen years, Spain has become an increasingly "hot" subject for medievalists and Judaicists alike, and new courses on the diverse cultural legacy of the Iberian Peninsula have continued to appear at colleges and universities throughout the Europe, Israel, and North America.1 The proliferation of such curricula has been aided by the publication of sourcebooks and readers that have enabled even nonspecialists to offer courses on medieval Iberia that highlight the important contributions of Muslims, Jews, and Conversos to the broader history of the medieval Iberian world.2 The historiographic motif that runs throughout this new interest in medieval Spain is the subject of convivencia, or coexistence—a term that has been used to describe the tripartite society of medieval Iberia ever since it was introduced by the great Spanish philologist and historian Américo Castro in the 1940s.3 In recent years, this term has been embraced and distorted by an ever-widening group of academics, journalists, and politicians, a phenomenon that increasingly challenges historians of medieval Spain to return convivencia to its original context. [End Page 1] In the field of Jewish Studies, the fascination with the relative acceptance of Jews in medieval Spain and the resulting rapprochement between the Sephardim and their host societies date back to the German-Jewish Wissenschaft historians of the late nineteenth century. Frustrated by the Jews' problematic encounter with modern European culture, the founders of Jewish Studies thought they had found, with the medieval Sephardim, a paradigm of a Jewish society that could integrate into its host culture without losing its own identity.4 Over the course of the past 50 years, Hispanists and scholars of Jewish history have taken up the discourse on the nature of convivencia, using it as a lens through which medieval Iberian civilization might be understood. The debate has traditionally centered around two polarized views. Some regard medieval Iberian society as a model of tolerance and cross-cultural interaction. This, indeed, was the original stance of both Castro and the Jewish historians who preceded him. Whereas the Wissenschaft scholars sought a paradigm of Jewish- gentile symbiosis, Castro and his followers hoped to explain the unique character of Spanish civilization and believed that the answer was the contributions of Iberia's Muslim and Jewish societies. They argued that España es diferente—"Spain is different"—from the rest of Latin Christendom, its civilization the product of a unique religious and cultural frontier that brought Muslims, Christians, and Jews together in close contact with one another. Castro's vision of Spanish history as the result of cross-cultural influences was challenged by his lifelong critic and counterweight, Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, who saw Muslims and Jews as having little impact on the formation of the Spanish character, and who argued that medieval Spanish culture is best characterized by conflict, not cooperation.5 Although a somewhat altered version of Castro's thesis has generally won out among most Hispanists, the corrective offered by Sánchez Albornoz has found increasing support within Jewish Studies, especially among scholars assessing Jewish life in Muslim Iberia. Influenced, in part, by the deterioration of Arab-Israeli relations since the 1960s, a number of critics of convivencia have countered the idyllic view of an interfaith utopia in medieval Spain, pointing out the persecutions against Jewish populations under the Muslim Almoravid and Almohad dynasties of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the widespread Christian pogroms and forced conversions of Jews in 1391, and the cycle of forced conversions, expulsions, and inquisitorial harassment of Jewish and Muslim communities throughout the late medieval and early modern periods.6 [End Page 2] To be sure, recent decades have witnessed the publication of more nuanced studies of Sephardic interaction with gentile culture, many of which have wisely substituted geographically and temporally limited portraits for the broad canvases favored by the likes of Castro and Sánchez Albornoz. Nonetheless, the tendency to couch the discussion of medieval convivencia in terms of either...

The 'Roman Noir' in Post-War French Culture: Dark Fictions by Claire Gorrara (review)

MLRy ioo.i, 2005 221 it is threatened with destruction, figured as an irreducible residue which emerges at the point where it is most contested. If this notion of a fragile yet indestructible humanity that survives the death of the human being finds resonances in the images of spectrality and of ash scattered through the work of thinkers such as Blanchot, Derrida, and Agemben, Crowley also, crucially, unpicks the irreducible differences between their ideas and those of Antelme. The study goes on to explore how Antelme rethinks community and solidarity in the face of their apparent impossibility within and beyond the Nazi camps: community and solidarity survive, but only through solitary resistance to a regime which sought to destroy the possibility of solidarity. This model of solidarity is shown not only to anticipate Antelme's own later political interventions, usefully detailed here, but also to connect Antelme to later thinkers: not only Blanchot and Mascolo, but also Derrida and Nancy. This leads to a discussion of L'Espece humaine as a theorization and enactment of testimony. Crowley focuses on Antelme's imagery and style (a frequently ignored aspect of L'Espece humaine) to draw out a model of testimony as fragile, emergent only via the figure of the (future) reader, and always threatened by its own potential impossibility. Crowley's challenging and detailed study shows vitally that if Antelme is ultimately and necessarily writing within the limits of his own period, none the less he makes an urgent, ethical, and highly politicized challenge to the reader which may never be realized, yet which remains all the more pressing at the beginning ofthe twenty-firstcentury. University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne Kathryn Robson The 'Roman Noir' in Post-War French Culture: Dark Fictions. By Claire Gorrara. (Oxford Studies in Modern European Culture) Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2003. vi + i36pp. ?30. ISBN 0-19-924609-2. In line with the brief of the Oxford Studies in Modern European Culture series? the presentation, for a student readership, of a selection of texts seen as elucidating specific developments in European culture?this exploration of French noir fiction includes readings of half a dozen texts (including one film), one from each decade since the 1940s, and each considered as symptomatic ofthe social and cultural context of its creation. Thus in addition to a narrative of developments in crime writing, this study also maps major (socio-)historical landmarks ofthe past sixty years in France, sketching briefoutlines ofcollaboration and resistance, decolonization, consumerism, 1968, immigration, and women's rights. Most ofthe six works featured?Leo Malet's 120, rue de la Gare, Henri-Georges Clouzot's filmof Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac 's Les Diaboliques, Jean-Patrick Manchette's Le Petit Bleu de la cote ouest, Didier Daeninckx's Meurtres pour memoire, Daniel Pennac's La Fee carabine, and Maud Tabachnik's Un ete pourri?are canonical within the genre. While one could always quibble about choices where the range is so restricted, a number of other prominent figures are mentioned frequently (Maurice Dantec, Thierry Jonquet, etc). In each chapter, discussion of the representative text forthe decade in question is framed by introductory sections on social context and contemporary cultural trends, and by a concluding consideration of the text's impact on and place in subsequent develop? ments. This structural emphasis on context at the expense of the texts' own literary qualities is generally best suited to critical study of popular fiction,where literary ambitions are modest. The excellent discussion of Manchette, by no coincidence the most cerebral ofthe authors treated here, and whose literary gifts go beyond the reflection of a particular social context, could have been taken furtherwere it not forthe brevity imposed by the format. Another area of tantalizing possibilities is the discussion of film noir, where important questions are raised as to the nature of the genre. How? ever, for those who would wish for more detailed treatment of topics touched on in 222 Reviews this introductory study, helpful indicators to furtherreading abound. Reading crime fiction in terms of social history is an interpretative choice which inevitably sidelines narratological discussion of how suspense is created and maintained. Yet surely this, and not...

BEAUTY OR BEAST, OR MONSTROUS REGIMENTS? ROBERTSON AND BURKE ON WOMEN AND THE PUBLIC SCENE

The Enlightenment can usefully be conceived as a confrontation with eroding Christian and classical republican ethics. It was permeated with assumptions about women and the gendered dichotomy between public and private spheres. While William Robertson and Edmund Burke, along with many of their contemporaries, remained committed to Christian- and republican-based conceptions of virtue, they were working within a new Enlightenment paradigm. Its political agenda has to be understood by way of its configurations of beauty, taste, and morality as these relate to the imperatives and needs of modern societies of a high level of sophistication and differentiation. An examination of two themes in the work of Robertson and Burke—the nature of women in “savage” and “civilized” societies, and “beauty in distress”—reveals how long-held convictions about the character of women, especially with regard to their capacity and right to appear in the public domain, were modified and adjusted to the idea of progress, and became central to an enlightened affirmation of modern European civilization. The result had its ironies. On the one hand, a positive public and indeed political role was invented for women that is central to understanding the overall thrust of a political discourse based on politeness, civility, refinement and similar values specifically associated with modern commercial societies. On the other hand, though the complexity of this model of society gave ample scope to informal and spontaneous vehicles of social disciplining, whatever room was left for the more traditional ways of governing polities through the direct exertion of political power remained closed to women: the very features that opened for them the opportunity to play political roles through sociability in the public sphere also circumscribed them.

Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg (eds), Bodily extremities: preoccupations with the human body in early modern European culture, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003, pp. ix, 235, illus., £45.00 (hardback 0-7546-0726-7).

Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg (eds), Bodily extremities: preoccupations with the human body in early modern European culture, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003, pp. ix, 235, illus., £45.00 (hardback 0-7546-0726-7). - Volume 48 Issue 4

Stars and Masculinities in Spanish Cinema: From Banderas to Bardem by Chris Perriam (review)

818 Reviews reference to the rural/urban divide in Spain, its progressive growth and the interac? tion that results from this division. The main objective ofthe book, which is achieved despite its ambitiousness, is to explore the relationship between urban and rural spaces and the way in which this relationship changes over time, influenced by the globalization process and by the Spanish postmodern condition. The result of the study is an in-depth analysis of urban-rural relations and confrontations in a variety of cultural productions, both filmic and literary,ranging from the 1950s to the 1990s. The author chooses a number of emblematic pieces, such as Tiempo de silencio, Surcos, El cuarto de atrds, La prima Angelica and iQue he hechoyo para mereceresto?, and successfully analyses them from a variety of angles. He delves into the way in which cultural, social, and economic changes in Spain are reflected in the cultural production of its writers and film directors, who, in one way or another, continue to search for identity as a reaction against the globalization process. The book is extremely well presented and clearly organized with an extensive and up-to-date bibliography and filmography. As regards structure and layout, the chap? ters are grouped together in sections, which makes the reading very easy and enjoyable while maintaining academic rigour. Every chapter has a conclusion that not only summarizes the main ideas but also points forward to aspects dealt with in subsequent chapters. The only defect is that the general conclusion at the end is rather abstract and fails to tie up the loose ends and provide an overarching summary of the main concepts that have been discussed. Postmodern Paletos is a remarkable piece of work, a relevant contribution to the growing field of Spanish cultural studies and a recommended addition to reading lists of courses on twentieth-century Spanish culture. University of Limerick Maria Cinta Ramblado-Minero Stars and Masculinities in Spanish Cinema: From Banderas to Bardem. By Chris Perriam. (Oxford Studies in Modern European Culture, 11) Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2003. ix + 22ipp. ?35. ISBN 0-19-815996-x. Within the plethora of books published on contemporary Spanish cinema over the past fiveyears, Chris Perriam's Stars and Masculinities in Spanish Cinema really does stand out. For, unlike a substantial proportion of scholars working in this field, Per? riam maps out a completely differentdirection for Spanish film studies by moving away from a primary concentration on the auteur, or thematics of gender, sexuality, nationality and textuality, to posit an approach which centres on star studies. While Rob Stone's excellent recent introduction to film in Spain, Spanish Cinema (Lon? don: Longman, 2001), does provide brief overviews of Antonio Banderas, Victoria Abril, Javier Bardem, and Penelope Cruz (pp. 183-205), few have taken up the chal? lenge of approaching Spanish cinema through the prisms of star studies. Ginette Vincendeau's 2000 publication, Stars and Stardom in French Cinema (London and New York: Continuum), presents an exemplary model in charting twentieth-century French film through a select number of male and female stars from Max Linder to Juliette Binoche. Perriam never attempts to emulate Vincendeau's approach or that of others who have defined the terrain of star studies within filmscholarship (Richard Dyer, Steven Cohan, Paul McDonald, Geoffrey Macnab, Christine Gledhill, and others). Rather, while drawing on previous publications in this area, he carves out a differentline of enquiry, examining the national cinema of Spain through a select number of male case studies, figures whose body of work comes in the period of post-Francoism. The book's catchy subtitle ('From Banderas to Bardem') is slightly misleading as the book's firstchapter dissects the work of a marginally older actor, MLR, 99.3, 2004 819 Imanol Arias?although, like Bardem, he made his film debut in 1982?and the fi? nal chapter concludes with an assessment of the twenty-something figures currently enjoying top billing in the films ofthe last decade (Eduardo Noriega, Fele Martinez, Liberto Rabal, and Juan Diego Botto). A minor quibble about the subtitle aside, this really is a critically informed, beau? tifully written, lucid account of each actor's oeuvre. Chapter 1...

Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture (review)

Reviews 195 Parergon 21.2 (2004) Egmond, Florike and Robert Zwijnenberg, Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture,Aldershot,Ashgate 2003; cloth; pp. 235; 27 b/w illustrations; RRP £45; ISBN 0754607267. This book is one of a growing collection of essays and monographs that focus on ‘the body’ as an historical entity. The ‘the’ is important here as it highlights the detachment of the physical from any individual identity or personage. The representation of the body as something apart is, in some ways, an extreme version of the mind/body split. Such a separation has, of course, provided opportunities for some creative rethinking of historical issues and there have been some significant, interesting and useful studies that have arisen from these approaches. The Early Modern period seems to have been particularly fruitful for such enquiries, perhaps in part due to the existence of such a mind/body split in this period and the resulting ramifications from this. The editors draw parallels between this loosely defined period and contemporary preoccupations. In particular, the focus here is on the body in extremis. While the editors’ listing of modern manifestations of this interest includes body art, piercings and tattoos, cosmetic surgery, forms of sport, drug usage and eating disorders, the Early Modern examples are of a different character: monstrous births and physical deformities, body snatching, public dissections, public punishments and judicial torture and religious phenomena that ‘we would now describe as eating disorders or psychosomatic symptoms’. Interestingly, what distinguishes this latter set of categories is the accident and the institutional, operating less through choice than imposition. The topics covered in this collection are wide-ranging, from body-snatching and public executions and torture, to circumcision and crypto-Judaism in Spain. The approaches taken are similarly eclectic. The editors write that the volume ‘concentrates on cultural themes, yet it cannot be classified as a product of traditional cultural history’ (p. 2). They reject the ‘strict boundaries of modern academic disciplines’ such as literature and art history, yet the majority of essays do not read as a radical diversion from contemporary scholarship in such areas, at least in their theoretical underpinnings. It could be argued, however, that those essays which most closely resemble more straightforward scholarship in these fields are the least successful. All but two use images as their catalyst and this perhaps reflects the growing uneasiness with the application of literary theory to the visual, which so often seems to exclude or ignore the particularities and peculiarities of visual knowledges. While I find the editors’justifications for their 196 Reviews Parergon 21.2 (2004) reluctance to be confined within disciplinary boundaries ultimately unconvincing, I cannot help wondering if this defence is more a reflection of current European debates rather than those in the English-speaking world. The essays come out of a project supported by the Huizinga Institute in the Netherlands. In some ways, the introduction was a lost opportunity to explore more fully the themes and issues that emerged from the project. The essays themselves are very rich and highlight the value of interdisciplinary approaches. Florike Egmond’s essay ‘Execution, Dissection, Pain and Infamy – A Morphological Investigation’ and Esther Cohen’s ‘The Expression of Pain in the Later MiddleAges: Deliverance, Acceptance and Infamy’stand out as particular highlights. Egmond points out that corporal punishment gradually replaced blood money and fines during the Early Modern period, together with judicial torture, with the transition to inquisitorial procedures in criminal trials. She also argues that there was some connection between the emergence of these practices and debates in the natural sciences concerning observation, experiment, truth and evidence. Public dissection and execution are also more closely intertwined than might be expected. Apart from the use of executed criminals as the source for the subjects of dissection, in both areas there is a clear equation between physical integrity and honour, or rather the lack thereof. The rituals and representations of both in art also highlight the similar attitudes to them. Cohen’s essay is similarly fascinating. She traces historical attitudes towards pain, pointing out the shifting perceptions of the role of pain and its...

Review: Bodily Extremities. Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture

Review: Bodily Extremities. Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture

Florike Egmond;, Robert Zwijnenberg (Editors). Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture. viii+235 pp., illus., index. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2003. $79.95 (cloth).

Florike Egmond;, Robert Zwijnenberg (Editors). <i>Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture</i>. viii+235 pp., illus., index. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2003. $79.95 (cloth).

Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture

Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture

Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, volume 1 : Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern World; The History of the Jews in the NetherlandsMatt Goldish and Richard H. Popkin (eds), Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture , volume 1: Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern World . Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 2001. xix, 238 pp. £68.25.

Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, <i>volume 1</i> : Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern World; The History of the Jews in the NetherlandsMatt Goldish and Richard H. Popkin (eds), <i>Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture</i> , volume 1: <i>Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern World</i> . Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 2001. xix, 238 pp. £68.25.

Transcultured Selves Under Scrutiny: W(h)ither Languages?

The paper responds to the invitation in the Conference Guidelines to consider whether 'the transcultured self is a utopian ideal'. Taking a humanist and Bergsonian view, it presents three transcultured selves from modern European culture to explore a model of cultural identity based on the idea of being in becoming. Foreign language acquisition is viewed as integral to the ideal of an enlarging consciousness which comes to embrace the 'other' through accommodating new ways of seeing and responding to the world. A pedagogical model is proposed for exploring this conception, centred on the emerging genre of border-writing and the establishment of a new literary canon.

Provincial Russia in the Age of Enlightenment: The Memoir of a Priest's Son, Dmitrii Ivanovich Rostislavov by Alexander M. s&gt; Martin Dmitrii Ivanovich Rostislavov (review)

562 SEER, 8i, 3, 2003 applied;where not an individual'smother-tongue would be declared irrelevant , and the issue of nationality would be decided by the (supposedly)more scientificmeans of anthropology. Double standardswere rife. The germanization experienced in regions such as Posnania was condemned as a heinous crime, yet the polonization of the Lithuanian and Byelorussian elites was viewed as part of a civilizing mission. Furthermore,just as Polish nationalists viewed the Kulturkampf and germanization campaigns as new and dangerous phases in the Drang nach Osten, they, in turn, advocated polonizing the regained 'Western provinces' and spoke freely about 'dominating and assimilating'other nationalities (p. I88). The argument of 'historicterritory' was often based upon a very skewed reading of history. Silesia, for example, could be claimed as an integral part of the medieval Piast kingdom, but this ignored the fact thatit was thoroughlygermanized and had left Polishcontrol in I335, spending the intervening centuries under 'foreign' rule. It was not unlikenineteenth-centuryBritonslodging a claim to Anjou. Though one can readilysympathizewith the plight of Polishnationalistsof the nineteenth century, it is hard to escape the conclusion that, on the territorial issue at least, they wanted it all ways. Some of their assertions verged on the absurd. One publicistwrote of the 'centurieslong sleep of the Polish Silesians' (p. 348). The implication being that once kissed by the attentions of Warsawnationalists, the latter would awaken and realize their long-forgotten love for the Polish nation. The reality, in contrast to this romantic (and simplistic)ideal, was that many Polish Silesianspreferredthe 'devil they knew' and opted to remain in Germany. Indeed, such attitudes often persistedthroughthe borderplebiscitesof the I920S. Gehrke sees one explanation for the nationalist position in a Polish 'inferioritycomplex' towardsits western neighbour. That may well be. But it fails to incorporate the factor of simultaneous Polish high-handedness and insensitivity towards its eastern neighbours. Perhaps a more convincing analogy, therefore, would be a series of 'nesting Orientalisms', with each viewing its eastern neighbour as inferior and ripe for 'civilization' whilst viewing its western neighbour with a mixture of envy, hatred and fear. This typology goes some way to explaining the peculiarly schizophrenic positions adoptedby Poland'sbrilliantbut flawednationalistsof the nineteenth century. Though the concluding discussionis a little insubstantial,Gehrkenonetheless succeeds in presentingan admirablythorough surveyof the development of Polishterritorialclaims through the nineteenth century.At each stage, the widercontext is outlined, includingthe influenceof grandpolitics, cultureand the changes in attitudetowardsGermany. lTniversity ofStrathclyde ROGER MOORHOUSE Martin,AlexanderM. (trans.anded.). Provincial Russiainthe AgeofEnlightenment. 7The Memoir of a Priest'sSon,DmitriiIvanovich Rostislavov. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2002. xliii + 236 pp. Maps. Tables. Illustrations.Notes. Bibliography.Index. $42.00; $22.00. THE extensive memoirs of Dmitrii Ivanovich Rostislavov (I809-I877) appeared in Russkaia Starina between i88o and I895. Rostislavov, child of a REVIEWS 563 dynasty of Russian village clerics near Riazan', survived education in the seminary system to become professor of physics and mathematics at the St PetersburgEcclesiasticalAcademy. In Martin's extremely sympathetic presentation , Rostislavov was 'a characteristicproduct of an eite ecclesiastical education, [ ...] fluent in French, German and English in addition to Greek, Latin, and Old Church Slavonic. He was well read, but in contrastto many upper-classliteratihe was grounded in Russian folk and clericaltraditionsas well as in the classicsand in modern European and noble culture. Analytical and inquisitive, he displayed at the same time a strongly ascetic, moralistic streak,a distrustof vanity and elegance, and a determinationto unmaskevildoers (but also confess past sins of his own) that reflect the deeply religious character of a clerical upbringing .[. . .]' (p. xxix). He probably started his memoirs in the i 86os, at a time when he was also producing writingsdeeply criticalof the black clergy and the institutionalchurch in general, so that his approach to his own milieu fitsin with that of Belliustin,Pomialovskiiand the mid-centurymovement towardreform.ForMartin,however, and forthe nonspecialistreaderatwhom thistext is aimed, the main interestof thesememoirs is more broadly social-historical:Rostislavov evokes with great directnessthe world of his childhood, both his own life as member of a priest'sfamily in a rural village, and the wider world of forest, swamp, villagers, drunkards, robbers, and officialdom around him. In particular,although some relevant material has been edited out to leave room...

The Novel in Anglo-German Context: Cultural Cross-Currents and Affinities by Susanne Stark

54? Reviews 'Orthodox', for the title probably reflects this. Nevertheless, it is striking how, with few exceptions (including the contributions of the editors themselves), the articles in fact deal with distinctively Orthodox aspects of Dostoevskii's work: icons and iconography , Trinitarian theology, the kenotic tradition, the Johannine bias, and so forth. The reader might experience this as a tension or, more generously, appreciate it as putting the non-Slavist reader in a position to reassess Dostoevskii's place in Western religious thought in the light of the denominational insights afforded by this volume. The standard of the articles is generally very high. Everyone will have their favourites. I was particularly impressed by the contributions of Diane Oenning Thompson (on the biblical word in Dostoevskii's poetics), and of the two Russian contributors, Ivan Esaulov (on the categories of Law and Grace), and Vladimir Kan- tor (on Smerdiakov and Ivan Karamazov). A small number of articles disappointby a failure to subject a promising topic to sufficientlysatisfying analysis. The weaker contributions, however, are strengthened by the admirable coherence of the volume as a whole, which is judiciously divided into three subject areas?Orthodox practice, Christian theology, and case studies in 'reading Dostoevskii religiously'?and by the productive practice of cross-referencing between articles. The volume is supported by a comprehensive index and bibliography. University of Bristol Ruth Coates The Novel in Anglo-German Context: Cultural Cross-Currents and Affinities. Ed. by Susanne Stark. (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 38) Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. 2000. ii + 466pp. ?50. ISBN 9-0420-0698-6 (hbk). The papers collected in this volume all began life in a conference held at the Univer? sity of Leeds in September 1997. The topic was novel production fromthe eighteenth century to the present, viewed within the interplay of English and German culture. Inevitably, the resulting volume is something of a miscellany, and certain key topics seem under-represented, such as 'mainstream' literary realism in the German novel, the role of ideas in the novel, the status (if it still has any) of the Bildungsroman, the self-reflexive novel, the place of novel theory as a phenomenon accompanying the praxis of novel production, and so on. However, the miscellany is splendidly lively, and the sheer range of authors and topics explored is a delight. A number of big names are in evidence, including Swift, Scott, Dickens, the Brontes, Angela Carter, Rushdie on the English side, and Goethe, Hoffmann, Morgner, Grass on the German; as are certain key genres: the historical novel, the Gothic novel, the Schauerroman, and (most recently) the campus novel. Very often specific comparisons bear abundant fruit. Rosemary Ashton's discussion of the figure of the German professor, comic names and all, in nineteenth-century English fiction is a revelation. (One cannot, incidentally , help feeling that, although the ethos of German Wissenschaftmay generate more than its fairshare of oddities, the culture that can produce a Casaubon is in desperate need of a transfusion of conceptual sophistication in the German mode.) I was also very grateful forpapers on works that had hitherto escaped my notice, especially Andreas Kramer's discussion of Wyndham Lewis's Tarr, and Peter Skrine's spirited advocacy of Hall Caine's The Woman of Knockaloe. For all its disparateness, this volume bears witness to the urgent centrality of the novel within modern European culture. Intriguingly, it is that particular genre that seems constantly to carry a powerful cultural-symbolic load that goes far beyond specifically literary concerns, in the sense that it contributes urgently to the debate about the cultural and national identity of England and Germany. No doubt drama MLRy 98.2, 2003 541 and poetry could and do play a part in this process of corporate self-definition; but somehow one doubts ifanything can approach the sheer talismanic force of the novel as conduit for the soul ofthe nation. Clearly, one reason for this state of affairsis the fact that the novel's narrative condition (for obvious reasons) brings it close to that of historiographical writing. Moreover the novel, by tradition, has frequently been able to offera kind of stocktaking of the state of the nation. In any event, the...