| Jews and the Ends of Theory Contributor(s): Ginsburg, Shai (Editor), Land, Martin (Editor), Boyarin, Jonathan (Editor) |
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ISBN: 0823282007 ISBN-13: 9780823282005 Publisher: Fordham University Press OUR PRICE: $131.10 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: December 2018 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Religion | Judaism - General - History | Jewish - General - Literary Criticism | Jewish |
| Dewey: 909.049 |
| LCCN: 2018011247 |
| Physical Information: 0.8" H x 6.1" W x 9.1" (1.25 lbs) 336 pages |
| Themes: - Religious Orientation - Jewish - Ethnic Orientation - Jewish |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Theory, as it's happened across the humanities, has often been coded as "Jewish." This collection of essays seeks to move past explanations for this understanding that rely on the self-evident (the historical centrality of Jews to the rise of Critical Theory with the Frankfurt School) or stereotypical (psychoanalysis as the "Jewish Science") in order to show how certain problematics of modern Jewishness enrich theory. In the range of violence and agency that attend the appellation "Jew," depending on how, where, and by whom it's uttered, we can see that Jewishness is a rhetorical as much as a sociological fact, and that its rhetorical and sociological aspects, while linked, are not identical. Attention to this disjuncture helps to elucidate the questions of power, subjectivity, identity, figuration, language, and relation that modern theory has grappled with. These questions in turn implicate geopolitical issues such as the relation of a people to a state and the violence done in the name of simplistic identitarian ideologies. Clarifying a situation where "the Jew" is not readily or unproblematically legible, the editors propose what they call "spectral reading," a way to understand Jewishness as a fluid and rhetorical presence. While not divorced from sociological facts, this spectral reading works in concert with contemporary theory to mediate pessimistic and utopian impulses, experiences, and realities. Contributors: Svetlana Boym, Andrew Bush, Sergey Dolgopolski, Jay Geller, Sarah Hammerschlag, Hannan Hever, Martin Land, Martin Jay, James I. Porter, Yehouda Shenhav, Elliot R. Wolfson |
Contributor Bio(s): Geller, Jay: - Jay Geller is Professor of Modern Jewish Culture at Vanderbilt Divinity School and the Vanderbilt University Jewish Studies Program, and has also taught at the University of Vienna, Bryn Mawr College, Princeton University, Rutgers University, Swarthmore College, and Wesleyan University. He is the author of On Freud's Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions (2007), The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity (2011), and Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews (2018), all from Fordham University Press; and the co-editor of Reading Freud's Reading (New York University Press, 1994).Wolfson, Elliot R.: - Elliot R. Wolfson is the Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara. Between 1987 and 2014, he was the Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. He is the author of Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton University Press, 1994); Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (Fordham University Press, 2005); A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (Zone Books, 2011); Giving Beyond the Goft: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (Fordham University Press, 2014); and The Duplicity of Philosophy's Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other (Columbia University Press, 2018).Jay, Martin: - Martin Jay is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is an intellectual historian whose research has included the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, social theory, cultural criticism, and historiography. His many books include most recently Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (2004); The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics (2010); Essays from the Edge: Parerga and Paralipomena (2011); and Reason after Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory (2016).Hammerschlag, Sarah: - Sarah Hammerschlag is director of the MA program and an associate professor of religion and literature, philosophy of religions, and history of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She is the author of The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2010) and Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida and the Literary Afterlife of Religion (Columbia University Press, 2016). The Figural Jew received an Honorable Mention for the 2012 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award, given by the Association of Jewish Scholars, and was a finalist for the AAR's Best First Book in the History of Religions in 2011.Bush, Andrew: - Andrew Bush is a professor of Hispanic studies at Vassar College. He earned his PhD in comparative literature from Yale University in 1983. He has published articles on Golden Age Spanish literature, twentieth-century women authors in Spain, and twentieth-century Spanish American literature. He is the author of The Routes of Modernity: Spanish American Poetry from the Early Eighteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Century, from Bucknell University Press (2002), and Jewish Studies: A Theoretical Introduction published from Rutgers University Press (2011) in the Key Words in Jewish Studies Series, of which he is a co-editor. He was among a faculty group that designed Jewish studies program for the college, and he served as the program's first director. He has taught courses on Jewish textuality, the Holocaust, the history of German Jewish culture, and seminars on Jewish culture in Europe and the Americas between the two world wars.Shenhav, Yehouda: - Yehouda Shenhav (PhD, Stanford University, 1985) is a professor of sociology at Tel-Aviv University. His book on the area of history of management, Manufacturing Rationality: The Engineering Foundations of the Managerial Revolution, was published by Oxford University Press in 1999. His main work in the area of nationalism, ethnicity, and religion was published in The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Religion (Stanford University Press, 2006). His views on the Israeli- Palestinian conflict appeared in Beyond the Two-State Solution: A Jewish Political Essay (Polity Press, 2012).Boym, Svetlana: - Svetlana Boyom of blessed memory was the Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. An essayist, photographer, novelist, and playwright as well as the author of myriad scholarly articles, Dr. Boym was best known to a general readership for The Future of Nostalgia, her widely praised book of 2001 (Basic Books). In that work, which ranges meditatively over philosophy, history, art, literature, and the experience of displaced persons, she explored the web of memory and mythologizing that underpins the human longing for vanished worlds. In her 2010 Another Freedom (the University of Chicago Press), she similarly explores the notion of "freedom." Her preoccupation with these subjects was rooted partly in her own history as a Jewish émigré from the former Soviet Union.Dolgopolski, Sergey: - Sergey Dolgopolski is an associate professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and of Jewish Thought and is the Gordon and Gretchen Gross Professor of Jewish Thought at the University of Buffalo (SUNY). He holds a joint PhD in Jewish studies from UC Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union, and a Doctor of Philosophical Sciences from the Russian Academy of Sciences. His general area of interest is in philosophy and literature. He is the author of What Is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement (Fordham University Press, 2009), The Open Past: Subjectivity and Remembering in the Talmud (Fordham University Press, 2012), and Other Others: The Political after the Talmud (Fordham University Press, 2018).Hever, Hannan: - Hannan Hever is the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Professor of Judaic Studies and a professor of comparative literature at Yale University. He earned his PhD at the Hebrew University in 1984. In English he published Producing the Modern Hebrew Canon, Nation Building and Minority Discourse (New York University Press, 2002) Nativism, Zionism, and Beyond: Three Essays on Nativist Hebrew Poetry (Syracuse University, 2014); and Suddenly the Sight of War: Violence and Nationalism in the Hebrew Poetry of the 1940s (Stanford University Press, 2017).Porter, James I.: - James I. Porter is Chancellor's Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Classics at the University of California at Berkeley. He began teaching at the University of Michigan in Classics and Comparative Literature (1986-2007), and then moved to UC Irvine, Classics and Comparative Literature (2007-2015), where he was director of Critical Theory from 2014 to 2015. He has held visiting professorships at Princeton and Bristol University (UK). His most recent book, The Sublime in Antiquity (Cambridge, 2016), was awarded the C. J. Goodwin Award of Merit by the Society for Classical Studies in 2017.Land, Martin: - Martin Land is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Hadassah College and the Open University of Israel.Ginsburg, Shai: - Shai Ginsburg is Associate Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Jewish Studies at Duke University.Boyarin, Jonathan: - Jonathan Boyarin is Diann G. and Thomas A. Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies in the Departments of Anthropology and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University.Land, Martin: - Martin Land is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Hadassah College and the Open University of Israel. |