Wandering Jew Research Articles

Melmoth Irreconcilable? Supersessionism and Jewish and Christian Responses to the Wandering Jew Legend

Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) draws from the legend of the Wandering Jew, infusing the figure with Faustian characteristics in an evolution already begun in William Godwin’s St. Leon (1799). Maturin’s Melmoth also reflects the anti-Judaism inherent in the Wandering Jew legend, especially supersessionism, which views Christianity as the true fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. The influence of supersessionism endures in discernible, but very different forms, in works influenced by Melmoth in French and in Yiddish. Drawing on Carol Davison’s analysis of Gothic antisemitism and Karen Grumberg’s important exploration of ‘Hebrew Gothic’, this essay discusses how Jewish writers, including Uri Zvi Greenberg (1896–1981), a poet of Yiddish and Hebrew from Lviv, Polish-born Yiddish novelist Sholem Asch (1880–1957), and contemporary U.S. novelist Dara Horn (b. 1977) have appropriated and adapted the legend of the eternal wanderer in ways that could be seen as reflecting a distinctly Jewish response to the gothic.

“But Now I Consydre Thy Necesse”: Augustine’s Doctrine of Jewish Witness and the Restoration of Racial Hierarchies in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament

This paper examines the depiction of Jewish and Christian merchants in the medieval English Host miracle play, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. This play is a critical illustration of religious racialization, effectively demonstrating the perpetuation of anti-Jewish stereotypes and legitimizing violence. Positioned within a broader scholarly debate, particularly in relation to Augustine’s doctrine of Jewish witness, the play portrays Jews as allegorical figures that validate Christian theological constructs. This paper delves into the representation and linguistic depiction of Jewish characters in the play, emphasizing their systematic dehumanization and instrumentalization in Christian narratives. A significant focus is placed on the coerced conversion of Jewish characters, which forces them into the archetype of the “Wandering Jew”, thereby highlighting motifs of symbolic aggression and unending diaspora. This paper also confronts contemporary scholarly perspectives that view the play as challenging religious boundaries, positing that such interpretations overlook the ingrained racialization and marginalization of Jewish identity during the European Middle Ages. It argues that the play’s transient disruption of power dynamics ultimately reinforces prevailing social hierarchies, thereby solidifying deep-seated anti-Jewish sentiments.

Freud and the Topos of the Wandering Jew

The question that initiated this investigation concerns Sigmund Freud’s inability to bring himself to leave Vienna during the years before and, then, the days after the Nazi annexation and invasion of Austria in March 1938. Why did Freud delay the decision to escape until it was almost too late? To try and understand such near-fatal immovability, my essay explores two models of mobility: the first is the convoluted folktale, legend, or chronicle of the Wandering Jew; the second is what I call ‘Freud’s train connections’, that is, his theoretical thinking about and personal experience of trains and railroad journeys. However, since Freud’s encounters with the Wandering Jew and his train connections intersect at several junctures, my discussion does not (and indeed cannot) keep them strictly or neatly apart.

Sámi Literature in Norwegian Language Arts Textbooks

Sámi Literature in Norwegian Language Arts Textbooks

I, Ahasuerus: Monsieur Chouchani in Israel, 1952–56

Abstract: In October 1952, a mysterious man boarded a ship sailing from Marseille to Haifa. In the previous several years he had been living in France, where he was known as "Monsieur Chouchani" and taught Talmud to Elie Wiesel and Emmanuel Levinas, among others. Once in Israel, he went by the name "Ben Shoushan." In neither country did anyone know his true identity, but all who met him were astounded: Chouchani/Ben Shoushan appeared practically omniscient, he spoke an astonishing number of languages, and he gave the impression of someone who had come from a different time in history. In this article, I reconstruct Monsieur Chouchani/Ben Shoushan's time in Israel between 1952–56. I claim that in order to understand his story fully, one needs to read it against three contexts: Israeli history of the early 1950s, the biographies of the people Chouchani/Ben Shoushan attracted, and the ancient legend of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew.

The Wandering Jews of the Jewish Theater

The Wandering Jews of the Jewish Theater

The Wandering Jews of the Jewish Theater (in Russian)

The Wandering Jews of the Jewish Theater (in Russian)

Mapping the Motif of the Wandering Jew in Salim Kumar’s Karutha Joothan

The motif of the Wandering Jew is an archaic motif whose conventional elements can function within widespread narrative contexts. Formally the motif might operate in the same manner as do other motifs: as just another component of the narrative structure. But because of the comprehensive nature of its features, this motif is able to deliver its essential message of human suffering even as it migrates through diverse cultural environments, as the interaction of its axiological elements with their newly acquired social and cultural contexts has the capacity to appear seamless and unlaboured. Salim Kumar’s Malayalam film Karutha Joothan (2017) is a case in point. The work employs this motif remarkably well in what is an uncharted cultural context: the dwindling community of Black Jews in Kerala. Along with articulating the distress of a marginalised community, the film memorialises a significant historical era. This paper examines the ways in which the film’s protagonist comes to represent the prototypical lonely wanderer of the generic myth.

Sarah Perry’s Melmoth and the Implications of Gothic Form

ABSTRACT I read Perry’s Melmoth through the lens of memory scholar Michael Rothberg’s 2019 The Implicated Subject, which provides a conceptual framework for moving beyond the victim/perpetrator binary when considering responsibility for historical violence and its legacies. I argue that in Melmoth, Perry uses gothic forms such as the tale and the found manuscript in ways that allow the reader to experience the moral and ethical dilemmas raised by the acts of violence and genocide that the novel references, including the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust. At the same time, however, I argue that Perry’s innovative revision of another gothic convention, the Wandering Jew legend, reinforces or even extends problematic representations of Jewish-Christian relations found in Charles Maturin’s 1820 novel Melmoth the Wanderer. By reimagining Melmoth’s “sin” as failure to bear witness to the truth of Christ’s resurrection, Perry’s narrative unwittingly re-inscribes the Christian supersessionism that so deeply informs Maturin’s work.

THE UNDYING

What conceptual merit does the undying – the one that does not die properly – hold? What form of life is left for those who do not achieve death, those that death (the right, the necessity – to die) was taken from them? The undying is a figure of thought; its traces can be found in ancient traditions, in myths and tales, in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew sources. The concept obtains new interpretations in modern writing. One (not the only) of its manifestations is the Wandering Jew (der ewige Jude). The Jew who, according to the Christian tale, was doomed not to die until the Last-Day expresses – in both literary and philosophical writings – in Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, in Goethe, Kafka, and Celan, a metaphysical construction/plan of being. The undying expresses death not as an ending, not even as the horizon, the purpose of life, but rather as its point of departure. In life there is death; the undying is a messenger of that being. After 1945, this figure was often linked with forms of extermination. Associated with the Nazi crime against Humanity and its methods of mass murder, the undying signifies not only the destruction of life forms, but also the destruction of death. This essay returns to study the undying, and to explore its philosophical implications and literary aspects, in and beyond its historical frameworks.

Allosemitism and cosmisation

In this article, we explore the fruitfulness of seeing allosemitism as an aspect of cosmisation. We explore possible tropes such as creating order from chaos, embracing Christian identity and supersessionism, and legitimising the Bible’s truth claims. Drawing from the Swedish press of the period 1770–1900, allosemitism and cosmisation are explored through the lens of three tenacious myths, all of which date back centuries: Blood Libel, the Wandering Jew and Israelite Indians. The ‘Jew’ as the Other is frequent in previous research. The combination of allosemitism and cosmisation gives us another way to explain the Othering of the ‘Jew’: expressions of allosemitism in a world-creating process.

Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution by Karen Grumberg (review)

Reviewed by: Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution by Karen Grumberg Maya Barzilai Karen Grumberg. Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. 328 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000295 The title of Karen Grumberg's 2019 book, Hebrew Gothic, states what is not obvious: modern Hebrew literature has not been often associated with the [End Page 473] European Gothic and its ghosts, supernatural phenomena, haunted castles, crypts, and labyrinths. Grumberg herself contends that the Gothic mode might appear at first "incompatible with the aesthetic and the setting of Israel/Palestine" (3). Over the course of this lucidly written volume, however, she makes a compelling case for considering Hebrew writers' engagement with the European and American Gothic. Through comparative readings of Hebrew fiction alongside popular Gothic works by Horace Walpole and Edgar Alan Poe, Grumberg shows that scholarship of Hebrew literature stands to gain from a reassessment of this corpus outside the conventional frameworks of Hebrew literary history and more classical European literature. The twentieth-century writers Grumberg discusses did not adopt the Gothic wholesale, but rather appropriated Gothic themes and conventions to offer a critical examination of the Jewish past; they also drew on the Gothic tradition in order to address the ambivalence inherent to Jewish nationalism, reopening wounds such as the displacement of Palestinians in 1948. The European Gothic has allowed Jewish writers to call into question the narration of past events, to engage both history and historiography. In Hebrew Gothic, Grumberg constellates European and American works with Hebrew literature spanning the early twentieth-century writers S. Y. Agnon, Dvora Baron, and Yaakov Shteinberg, through Leah Goldberg's mid-twentieth-century theatrical writing, to novels by Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua. She productively pairs Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Israeli writer Almog Behar's short story "Ana min al-yahoud" (I'm one of the Jews), and concludes the book with parody and black humor in twenty-first-century Gothic-inspired Israeli film and television. At the outset, Grumberg points out that "it is not only what gothic texts do but also how they do it that makes them gothic" (6). In other words, the transgression of established social, cultural, and national boundaries in Gothic works unleashes a state of anxiety, an atmosphere of terror. The Gothic trades in instability, Grumberg explains, and this instability stems from the return of repressed narratives in Gothic literature. One of the central questions Hebrew Gothic poses concerns how twentieth-century Hebrew writers engaged historical events in order to comment on the Jewish and Zionist present and future. In many of Grumberg's case studies, supernatural motifs and gothic scenes allow writers to interrupt linear narratives of national conquest and triumph, as well as to call into question gender norms and expectations. Divided into two parts, "A Spectralized Past" and "Haunted Nation," Hebrew Gothic balances works that contend with the Jewish European past with post-1948 Hebrew literature. Reading Agnon's macabre Polish stories, Grumberg shows how the author appropriated stereotypes of the Wandering Jew and the bloodthirsty Jew in order to "recalibrate the dynamics of victims and oppressors," assigning antisemitic tropes to Christian figures. The issue of victimization returns in the chapter on maternal figures in stories by Baron and Shteinberg. In contrast to the passive and repressed Gothic heroine, Grumberg reads the "gothic agunah" as both "excessively present" and "defiant" or resistant through her affect (85). Grumberg previously explored Space and Ideology in Contemporary Hebrew Literature (2012) and her current book likewise focuses on the spatiotemporal dimensions of the Hebrew Gothic. She focuses, for instance, on the [End Page 474] cuckoo clock in Leah Goldberg's "Lady of the Castle," interpreting it as a foreboding Gothic motif that also invites a spatial reading, as it leads to a secret passageway and room where Lena, a Holocaust survivor, remained locked away even after the war's conclusion. Grumberg's comparative analysis, drawing on the work of Poe, suggests that Goldberg narrated the castle as a spiritual sanctuary in response to the demand placed on her to produce ideologically enlisted literature. The notion of a "conflicted Zionism," becomes relevant also for Oz and Yehoshua...

Un converti convaincu, repentant et asexué ? (Anti-)Stéréotypes sur le Juif errant dans les romans français du XXe siècle

The present article seeks to analyse the figure of the Wandering Jew in five 20thcentury French novels (Carnet de route du Juif errant by Alexandre Arnoux, Les Entretiens d’Ahasvérus by Louis de Launay, Marches du Juif errant by Henry-Jacques, Jésus raconté par le Juif errant by Edmond Fleg and Histoire du Juif errant by Jean d’Ormesson). Its main goal is to answer the question to what extent the original image of the Jew is reproduced in the abovementioned prose works. In order to carry out his plan, the author takes into account the crucial and stereotypical characteristics which constitute the very nature of the Jewish vagabond. He tries then to point out major differences between the five novels and the popular version of the Ahasverian legend. The study of those elements shows that contemporary texts related to the immortal man break off with the traditional version of the legend and thus bear testimony of the so-called “death of the myth”.

Georg Simmel Wishing to "Save" Otto Weininger, or the Blurring Definitions of (Philosemitic) Science and (Antisemitic) Pseudoscience

Georg Simmel Wishing to "Save" Otto Weininger, or the Blurring Definitions of (Philosemitic) Science and (Antisemitic) Pseudoscience Tuvia Singer On July 15, 1916, the young Gershom Scholem wrote a letter to his older brother Werner, concerning the connection between Georg Simmel and the Austrian-Jewish philosopher Otto Weininger, who committed suicide in 1903 at the age of twenty-three. Scholem didn't think highly of Simmel (and neo-Kantianism in general) and portrayed him, echoing both Zionist and antisemitic discourses, as a talmudic, abstract, Jewish intellectual: "[Simmel] has created a machinery bearing the name 'Simmel' that functions as follows: one inserts a problem, the 'Simmel' machine moves and reacts purely, mechanically, it transfers the problem into a foreign language, and after a bit of time elapses a book or an essay gets spat out—which, if people consider it valuable, then has to be retranslated back into the original." As part of his criticism on Simmel, Scholem shares an anecdote that was recounted to him by Simmel's student Martin Buber, relating to the connection between Simmel and Weininger: "Simmel exclaimed: 'If Weininger had known me—Simmel!—he wouldn't have committed suicide!!!'" Scholem concludes: "It's rather naive to think that anything could have changed Weininger, whose disease […] came from himself, or rather from his Judaism. […] I can only analyze Weininger from a psychological rather than an evaluative angle."1 Putting aside Scholem's clinical observations and the reasons for his hostility toward Simmel, Hermann Cohen, and neo-Kantianism, I wish to focus on Simmel's confidence as to his ability to solve Weininger's existential [End Page 304] problems. Are there any theoretical links to be found between Simmel, one of the founders of modern sociology, and Weininger, a tragic figure whose writings are generally marginalized as antisemitic, misogynic, and pseudoscientific? As I will show in this essay, the answer is yes: there are strong similarities between Simmel's and Weininger's views on the nature of Jewish mobility, especially in their depiction of Jews as "strangers within," an elastic element that simultaneously combines contradicting elements of fluidity and stiffness. Weininger's famous and controversial book Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character, 1903) was aimed against the modern Viennese culture that Weininger considered to be stamped with the dual marks of femininity and Judaism. As part of his critique of the ostentation, decorativeness, eroticism, aesthetic blurring, and dissolution of borders between the self and the world that characterized fin de siècle Viennese culture, Weininger found mobility to be the defining shared characteristic of Judaism and femininity: the fluid borders of identity enabling the creation of a mask or parodic mimicry of a true, fixed, male, Aryan identity.2 Weininger's views were an integral part of fin de siècle anti-Jewish discourse concerned with Jewish mobility. Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, also known in Germany (since the end of the seventeenth century) as Der ewige Jude, "The Eternal Jew," was a prominent figure in this cultural debate. The tension embodied in this figure, between the static nature of eternality and the mobility of wandering, had been an integral part of the development of the legend of the Wandering Jew from its inception in the Middle Ages; hence, the complex use of these motifs during the nineteenth century simply continued earlier trends of alternating back and forth between the two.3 According to Weininger, Kundry—the "Wandering Jewess" of Wagner's final opera, Parsifal—represents the optimal incorporation of the essence of the Jew and the woman.4 "The congruency between Judaism and femininity seems to become complete, as soon as one begins to reflect upon the Jews' infinite capacity for change. […] Do these things not prove that both the [End Page 305] Jews and women are nothing and therefore can become anything?"5 Since the Jew has no distinct borders of individuality, he "is supple [elastisch] enough to wriggle out of any oppression"; as a group, the Jews are "coherent plasmodium spread over a wide area."6 In a like manner, the woman is nothing but "unformed matter […] absolutely devoid of qualities."7 Weininger's use of the philosophical concepts "matter" and "form" and his...

Wanderers of the New World: From the Jew as Other, to the Jew as (Uncanny) Double in “A Virtuoso's Collection” (1842) and “Ethan Brand” (1850)

AbstractThe legend of the Wandering Jew began as a European folk motif and migrated to America, where it gained a popularity unmatched in the countries of the Old World. This article focuses on the adaptation of this legend in the American gothic, and specifically on the literary rendition of the Wandering Jew in Hawthorne's “A Virtuoso's Collection” (1842) and “Ethan Brand” (1850). Hawthorne first staged this archetype in his short story titled “A Virtuoso's Collection,” in which the Jew serves as a chronicler and an eerie museum guide. In “Ethan Brand,” the Wandering Jew is recast as a “German Jew,” a showman carrying a diorama and showing sketches. There, he serves as both the figure of the Other and an image of the evil double. He proves to be a source of gothic horror, hinting at the pointlessness of the quest of the main protagonist, who claims to have identified and mastered the “Unpardonable Sin.” After the departure of the Jew, Brand kills himself, which could be interpreted as a victory of the doppelgänger typical of gothic tales. However, Brand's attempt to annihilate himself is incomplete, for it is mentioned in the explicit that his heart could not be burnt down. This ambiguous ending and lack of closure are true to the spirit of the legend, whereby the Jew must wander until messianic times. However, the real Jew behind the mask remains unaccounted for, as he is reduced to a mere literary representation of pure otherness.

The Wandering Jew Phenomenon: A Post-Diaspora Success

For long, migration and diaspora have been perceived negatively, resulted from social and psychological turmoil. They are believed to produce devastating outcomes, as the loss of identity, cultural hybridity, psychological crises, and social instability. Theorists, as Homi Bhabha, believe that "unhomliness", having lost the feeling of possessing a home, may also result in migration and cultural diaspora, as Robin Cohen argues. Yet, it is an illegitimate overgeneralization. I tend to propose a new perspective in this regard. I believe that specific types of diasporas have come to collaborate hugely in the progress of individuals epistemologically, psychologically, socially, and intellectually. I have drawn a comparison between the falsely undisputed notions of home, migration, diaspora, hybridity, and "unhomeliness" on one side, and on the other side this "Wandering Jew" phenomenon, which I have proposed. Moreover, this title has been deliberately adopted to refer to the negatively perceived notion of the myth of the Wandering Jew, that he is the everlasting sufferer. Contrarily, he might be the wisest, the ultimate 'uncaged', free living individual. This notion will be applied on V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival, which aptly fits into this proposed phenomenon.

Performance of foliage ornamentals in hydroponic nutrient solutions

Vertical garden is one of the approach of green building envelope with green facades and green living walls creates a richer ecosystem, enhances biodiversity, improves mental health, alleviates environmental externalization generated by urban areas (Pollution, runoff and heat island effect etc). However, the limitations of vertical gardening system are the choice of plants and the module of growing. Numerous exotic and native ornamentals are suggested for vertical systems based on the requirements. Selection of plants grown under indoor environments with limited space is narrowing down the choice of ornamental flora. On the other hand hydroponics is an alternative sustainable production system under conditions in which resources are limited. Hydroponics is a very young science which has commercial basis during recent days. However, even in relative short period of time it has been adapted in many situations from outdoor to indoor for growing various crops. Hence, an experiment was conducted with Hoagland & Arnon solution (1938), Cooper’s solution (1979), Saparamadu’s solution (2010) and Mattson and Peters solution (2014) and a control with Irrigation water to study the rooting behavior of five plants viz., Devil’s ivy (Epipremunm aureum), Wandering jew (Zebrina pendula), Arrowhead plant (Syngonium podophyllum), Philodendron (Philodendron erubescens), Boat lily (Tradescantia spathacea) under passive hydroponic vertical garden module. The pH was monitored for acidity and basicity range and EC were monitored for salt concentration in all the nutrient solution periodically. Observation on root parameters viz., Number of roots plant -1, Root length (cm) and Root weight (g plant-1) were observed at 30, 60 and 90 days after planting. Results of the experiment revealed that number of roots, root length and root weight exerted maximum values in those plants grown under T3 (Cooper’s solution). Minimum rooting with lowest weight was recorded in T4 (Saparamadu solution) in all the stages of observation in devil’s ivy. Whereas in other four ornamentals viz., Wandering jew (Zebrina pendula), Arrowhead plant (Syngonium podophyllum), Philodendron (Philodendron erubescens) and Boat lily (Tradescantia spathacea) recorded lowest root parameters in T1 (Irrigation water) under 30 days of observation and at 60 and 90 days minimum number of roots, root length and root weight was recorded under T4 (Saparamadu solution).

Radicant Israeli Art: From Past to Future

Mieke Bal’s concept of “migratory aesthetics” and the observation by Saloni Mathur and Anne Ring Peterson that “traditional notions of location, origin and authenticity seem obsolete and in urgent need of reconsideration” perfectly encompass the phrase “Jewish art”, and within that difficult-to-define subject, Israeli art (which, among other things, is not always “Jewish”). As Hava Aldouby has noted, Israeli art presents a unique inflection of the global condition of mobility—which in fact contributes to the problem of easily defining the category of “Israeli art”. Nothing could be more appropriate to the discussion of Israeli art, or to the larger definitional problem of “Jewish art” than to explore it through Nicolas Bourriaud’s botanical metaphor of the “radicant”, and thus the notion of “radicant art”. The important distinction that Bourriaud offers between radical and radicant plants—whereby the former type depends upon a central root, deep-seated in a single nourishing soil site, whereas the latter is an “organism that grows its roots and adds new ones as it advances…” with “…a multitude of simultaneous or successive enrootings”—is a condition that may be understood for both Israeli and Jewish art, past and present: Aldouby’s notion that the image of the Wandering Jew offers the archetypal radicant, informs both the “altermodernity” concept and Israeli art.

В.А. ЖУКОВСКИЙ И В. ФОН ШАДОВ: ПО МАТЕРИАЛАМ НЕОПУБЛИКОВАННЫХ ПИСЕМ ХУДОЖНИКА

The article presents, for the first time, an attempt to reconstruct the context and the object of creative contacts of Vasily Zhukovsky and Friedrich Wilhelm von Schadow (1788–1862), a theorist of painting and head of the Academy of Arts in Dusseldorf. The sources for the reconstruction were the previously unpublished eight letters by the German artist written in the period from 1838 to 1846 and now stored in the Manuscript Department of the Institute of Russian Literature and materials from the creative heritage of the Russian poet and artist. The article establishes new facts about the institutional role of Zhukovsky in the Russian-German cultural ties in the 19th century. Von Schadow gave some of his paintings in the original, in copies or prints for Zhukovsky’s personal collection and for the imperial collection of the future Hermitage. The list of these paintings is, for the first time, compiled in the article. The textual material is illustrated with images from von Schadow’s works discussed in the epistolary dialogue. Von Schadow’s published manifestos on the theory and criticism of Christian religious painting, which Zhukovsky read and which influenced his artistic worldview in the 1840s, are attributed. The article presents, for the first time, the most significant fragments from von Schadow’s letters of 1838–1845 translated into Russian. The fragments fill in the gaps in the objective representation of the scale of Zhukovsky’s activities at court on compiling a collection of Russian paintings both in the institutional and ideological artistic aspects. At the same time, the communication between the German artist and the Russian poet found reflection in Zhukovsky’s creative heritage of the late period: in his criticism, works on art theory, prose, and reflections. Von Schadow, in his last letters, and Zhukovsky, in his diary entries, pay special attention to reflections on pedagogical activities and works on the theory of fine arts, as well as on their social and political activities. The parable of the prodigal son was the final touch in the creative dialogue of the poet and the artist. Zhukovsky reflected this parable in his unfinished poem about the Wandering Jew. The lines of the poem paint in words fragments from the Sacred History quite in the spirit of von Schadow’s paintings: Zhukovsky compares the Wandering Jew who ascended Calvary with the prodigal son and depicts the holistic canvas of the inner and outer space of the character through his eyes. The conclusion is made that the discovered letters from von Schadow to Zhukovsky reveal the adherence of the both to the lofty romantic idea of a synthesis of arts based on the poetics of heartfelt feelings, artistic imagination, active teaching, and religious and mystical experience. Fine arts, science and history, issues of faith and politics of the mid-19th century were a background for the concentration of the correspondents on the rethinking of substantial religious and philosophical issues on the material of eternal biblical plots on the entombment of Christ, taking Christ down from the cross, on reasonable and unreasonable maidens, and, finally, on two parables about the lost sheep and the prodigal son, which became the ultimate embodiment of the dialogue of a poet and an artist in fine arts.

Revealing Layers: Sarnath Banerjee’s The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers

ABSTRACT Sarnath Banerjee's second graphic novel The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, a delightfully complex and remarkably multilayered work, is a significant contribution to Indian Graphic Narratives. This paper focuses on identifying and examining the layering strategies inherent in the text that endow it with its characteristic depth, complexity and density. The strategies identified include the exploitation of the multimodality of the comic format, the employment of multiple media, the incorporation of the legend of the Wandering Jew as the central trope, the playful treatment of history, a thematic layering of characters, and the utilization of intratextuality (textual echoes) and intertextuality. The paper further explores the way in which Calcutta, the primary setting of the novel, is rendered as a palimpsest-like entity where the colonial past is layered over by a post-colonial present. The novel’s emphasis upon a local readership with a global bent, leads to layers of reading based on readerly competence.