Search results
One day there was a knock at the door and Jewish American soldiers were standing there. There was a big American base near where we lived, and they were making enquiries to see whether there were any Jewish families left. They heard about us and came to visit. They brought chocolates and fruit, things we hadn’t seen for years. It was nearly Pesach , and they came to us for
This book explores how the contemporary American novel has revived a long literary and political tradition of imagining male friendship as interlinked with the promises and paradoxes of democracy in the United States. In the last decades of the twentieth century, not only novelists but philosophers, critical theorists, and sociologists rediscovered the concept of friendship as a means of scrutinising bonds of national identity. This book reveals how friendship, long exiled from serious political philosophy, returned as a crucial term in late twentieth-century communitarian debates about citizenship, while, at the same time, becoming integral to continental philosophy’s exploration of the roots of democracy, and, in a different guise, to histories of sexuality. Moving innovatively between these disciplines, this important study brings into dialogue the work of authors rarely discussed together – including Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Dinaw Mengestu, and Teju Cole – and advances a compelling new account of the political and intellectual fabric of the contemporary American novel.
touched or impressed him, Leconte crosses nationality and generation, before finally expressing his admiration for the iconic Jewish-American tragic-comic director and actor. This reluctance, this restless, irritable inability to commit to any one discernable position or to follow any singular influence is perhaps at the heart of Leconte’s diversity as a filmmaker. We have seen that this diversity is part of what irritates
This chapter considers Hail, Caesar! (2016) as a distinctive, although far from dogmatic, Jewish American meditation on visual representation of ‘the godhead’ and invocations of faith in classic Hollywood and post-classic cinema. In some ways, Hail, Caesar! is an indirect riposte to The Passion of the Christ (2004). I also consider Hail, Caesar!’s exploration of these issues in relation to A Serious Man (2009), the Coens’ early meditation, albeit in a different mode, on faith, and Ben-Hur (1959). Hail, Caesar! reworks the Charlton Heston Ben-Hur more profoundly and compellingly than the blockbuster remake of this film released later in 2016.
. Although some critics, such as Mark Shechner, have long argued that Roth possesses ‘the most distinctive voice in American fiction’, his position in the pantheon of classic post-war American authors was for many years somewhat precarious (Shechner 2003: 216). Critical acclaim and controversy came early to Roth and ensured that he was one of the most fashionable American novelists at the end of the 1950s and 1960s, but in the early 1970s his sales and his literary reputation began to decline and he was often regarded as the junior partner of a Jewish-American triumvirate
This book examines the impact that nostalgia has had on the Labour Party’s political development since 1951. In contrast to existing studies that have emphasised the role played by modernity, it argues that nostalgia has defined Labour’s identity and determined the party’s trajectory over time. It outlines how Labour, at both an elite and a grassroots level, has been and remains heavily influenced by a nostalgic commitment to an era of heroic male industrial working-class struggle. This commitment has hindered policy discussion, determined the form that the modernisation process has taken and shaped internal conflict and cohesion. More broadly, Labour’s emotional attachment to the past has made it difficult for the party to adjust to the socioeconomic changes that have taken place in Britain. In short, nostalgia has frequently left the party out of touch with the modern world. In this way, this book offers an assessment of Labour’s failures to adapt to the changing nature and demands of post-war Britain.
At a time when monolingualist claims for the importance of ‘speaking English’ to the national order continue louder than ever, even as language diversity is increasingly part of contemporary British life, literature becomes a space to consider the terms of linguistic belonging. Bad English examines writers including Tom Leonard, James Kelman, Suhayl Saadi, Raman Mundair, Daljit Nagra, Xiaolu Guo, Leila Aboulela, Brian Chikwava, and Caroline Bergvall, who engage multilingually, experimentally, playfully, and ambivalently with English’s power. Considering their invented vernaculars and mixed idioms, their dramatised scenes of languaging – languages learned or lost, acts of translation, scenes of speaking, the exposure and racialised visibility of accent – it argues for a growing field of contemporary literature in Britain pre-eminently concerned with language’s power dynamics, its aesthetic potentialities, and its prosthetic strangeness. Drawing on insights from applied linguistics and translation studies as well as literary scholarship, Bad English explores contemporary arguments about language in Britain – in debates about citizenship or education, in the media or on Twitter, in Home Office policy and asylum legislation – as well as the ways they are taken up in literature. It uncovers both an antagonistic and a productive interplay between language politics and literary form, tracing writers’ articulation of linguistic alienation and ambivalence, as well as the productivity and making-new of radical language practices. Doing so, it refutes the view that language difference and language politics are somehow irrelevant to contemporary Britain and instead argues for their constitutive centrality to the work of novelists and poets whose inside/outside relationship to English in its institutionalised forms is the generative force of their writing.
The Arab–Israeli conflict has been at the centre of international affairs for decades. Despite repeated political efforts, the confrontation and casualties continue, especially in fighting between Israelis and Palestinians. This new assessment emphasizes the role that military force plays in blocking a diplomatic resolution. Many Arabs and Israelis believe that the only way to survive or to be secure is through the development, threat, and use of military force and violence. This idea is deeply flawed and results in missed diplomatic opportunities and growing insecurity. Coercion cannot force rivals to sign a peace agreement to end a long-running conflict. Sometimes negotiations and mutual concessions are the key to improving the fate of a country or national movement. Using short historical case studies from the 1950s through to today, the book explores and pushes back against the dominant belief that military force leads to triumph while negotiations and concessions lead to defeat and further unwelcome challenges. In The sword is not enough, we learn both what makes this idea so compelling to Arab and Israeli leaders and how it eventually may get dislodged.
The policy responses of the American government to the horrors of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York still dominate news headlines and public debate. The destruction of the twin towers set forth vibrations that continue to radiate around the world. Catastrophes are ultimately defined by what is said about them, and - even with regard to the most radical of historical cataclysms - saying too much may produce hazards as compelling as those that result from saying too little. This book explores the themes of catastrophe, memory, and trauma through a chronologically ordered series of historical case studies. Inevitably, given the multifaceted character of these themes, the authors - historians, sociologists, and literary critics - deploy a variety of methodologies appropriate to their study. The approaches range from sharply focused investigations of the construction of official and unofficial memories contemporary with the event, through longitudinal studies of shifts in commemorative discourse and practice over decades or centuries, to detailed analysis of individual memorialising texts. The book presents longitudinal surveys, particularly developed in two essays tracing the shifting patterns of the memory of pre-twentieth-century catastrophes: the mid-seventeenth-century English Civil Wars, and the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s. It also addresses the political instrumentalisation of memory in relation to the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s.
From Princeton, Sydney or Nairobi, the world which Hanif Kureishi describes might well appear cosmopolitan, even exotic. To British readers - and more particularly to London-based ones - however, Kureishi might seem a local, even parochial, kind of writer. Kureishi belongs to a tradition of inquiry into the 'state of the nation' and the meanings of 'Englishness' which reaches back well into the nineteenth century. The short story collection Love in a Blue Time (1997) typifies Kureishi's consistent perception that even the most trivial details of everyday British life indicate how imbricated in this imperial past the nation nonetheless remains. Kureishi recognises that Britain's demise as a world power is not, of course, simply a consequence of decolonisation but of political re-alignments and economic restructuring on a global scale in the period since 1945. From his early days in the theatre Kureishi has tried to construct a popular readership/audience which he feels might be intimidated or confused by experimentalism. Kureishi's use of language also bears little resemblance to the practices of many 'world' and postcolonial writers. One consequence of both the histories of British imperialism and current American domination of the world's media has been the entrenchment of English as the 'world language'.