Author: Sarah KofmanPublisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803227316
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 112
Book Description
The author, a prominent French philosopher, writes of life under the German occupation
A Life of Her Own
Author: Emilie CarlesPublisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0140169652
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Book Description
First published in France in 1977, this autobiography vivifies the captivating Carles from her peasant origins in a tiny Alpine village through her work as a teacher, farmer, mother, feminist and political activist.
Autobiographical Jews
Author: Michael StanislawskiPublisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295803797
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Book Description
Autobiographical Jews examines the nature of autobiographical writing by Jews from antiquity to the present, and the ways in which such writings can legitimately be used as sources for Jewish history. Drawing on current literary theory, which questions the very nature of autobiographical writing and its relationship to what we normally designate as the truth, and, to a lesser extent, the new cognitive neurosciences, Michael Stanislawski analyzes a number of crucial and complex autobiographical texts written by Jews through the ages. Stanislawski considers The Life by first-century historian Josephus; compares the early modern autobiographies of Asher of Reichshofen (Book of Memories) and Glikl of Hameln (Memoirs); analyzes the radically different autobiographies of two Russian Jewish writers, the Hebrew Enlightenment author Moshe Leib Lilienblum and the famous Russian poet Osip Mandelstam; and looks at two autobiographies written out of utter despair in the midst and in the wake of World War II, Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday and Sarah Kofman’s Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. These writers’ attempts to portray their private and public struggles, anxieties, successes, and failures are expressions of a basic drive for selfhood which is both timeless and time-bound, universal and culturally specific. The challenge is to attempt to unravel the conscious from the unconscious distortions in these texts and to regard them as artifacts of individuals’ quests to make sense of their lives, first and foremost for themselves and then, if possible, for their readers.
And the Bridge Is Love
Author: Faye MoskowitzPublisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 155861771X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 101
Book Description
A collection of life stories so funny, moving that “you don’t have to be a Jewish feminist mama to love this book . . . but it wouldn’t hurt” (Tablet Magazine). Here are the collected autobiographical writings of memoirist, poet, and professor Faye Moskowitz. Known for both her sense of humor—even in the bleakest of circumstances—and her insight into the relationships that define who we are, where we come from, and where we hope to be going, Moskowitz shares her own life stories in “a book that will make you stand up and cheer” (The Detroit News). From her childhood in Detroit during the Great Depression to the time when her mother abandoning the family to pursue her own dreams; from helping a dying friend simply get through another day to a hilarious account of binge eating at a wedding; from finding love and leaving home to building her own family and legacy, these recounted experiences give us “her piercingly tender observations about unlikely friendships, transgressive love, disappointing plants, and sacred Jewish rituals of the kitchen” (Lilith Magazine).
Smothered Words
Author: Sarah KofmanPublisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810115057
Category : Holocaust survivors' writings
Languages : en
Pages : 132
Book Description
In Smothered Words, the philosopher Sarah Kofman acknowledges her personal history, evoking for the first time in a published work her father's deportation and death in Auschwitz. Kofman juxtaposes readings of the work of Maurice Blanchot, reflections on The Human Race, Robert Antelme's account of his deportation to a German prison (also available from Northwestern University Press), and her recognition of having outlived her father and survived the Holocaust. Her consideration of these three figures and the texts associated with them serves as a meditation on the contrasting imperatives of history, autobiography, and critical writing. Kofman committed suicide in 1995. Smothered Words addresses both the effects on representation of the emotional suffering of the survivors and the ethical questions raised in representing the Holocaust. Kofman explores the relationships and tensions among autobiographical, historical, and philosophical approaches to writing the Holocaust.
A French Tragedy
Author: Tzvetan TodorovPublisher: Dartmouth College Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 168
Book Description
An internationally renowned scholar examines an episode in the chaos & retributive strife that engulfed France during the liberation at the end of World War II.
Black and Blue
Author: Carol MavorPublisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822352710
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 236
Book Description
Audacious and genre-defying, Black and Blue is steeped in melancholy, in the feeling of being blue, or, rather, black and blue, with all the literality of bruised flesh. Roland Barthes and Marcel Proust are inspirations for and subjects of Carol Mavor's exquisite, image-filled rumination on efforts to capture fleeting moments and to comprehend the incomprehensible. At the book's heart are one book and three films—Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, Chris Marker's La Jetée and Sans soleil, and Marguerite Duras's and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour—postwar French works that register disturbing truths about loss and regret, and violence and history, through aesthetic refinement. Personal recollections punctuate Mavor's dazzling interpretations of these and many other works of art and criticism. Childhood memories become Proust's "small-scale contrivances," tiny sensations that open onto panoramas. Mavor's mother lost her memory to Alzheimer's, and Black and Blue is framed by the author's memories of her mother and effort to understand what it means to not be recognized by one to whom you were once so known.
Author: Sarah KofmanTrauma Culture
Author: E. Ann KaplanPublisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813535913
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Book Description
E. Ann Kaplan explores the relationship between the impact of trauma on individuals and on entire cultures and nations. Arguing that humans possess a need to draw meaning from personal experience and to communicate what happens to others, she examines the forms that are used to bridge the experience.
Shadows in the City of Light
Author: Sara R. HorowitzPublisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438481756
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Book Description
The essays in Shadows in the City of Light explore the significance of Paris in the writing of five influential French writers—Sarah Kofman, Patrick Modiano, George Perec, Henri Raczymow, and Irene Nemirovsky—whose novels and memoirs capture and probe the absences of deported Paris Jews. These writers move their readers through wartime and postwar cityscapes of Paris, walking them through streets and arrondissments where Jews once resided, looking for traces of the disappeared. The city functions as more than a backdrop or setting. Its streets and buildings and monuments remind us of the exhilarating promise of the French Revolution and what it meant for Jews dreaming of equality. But the dynamic space of Paris also reminds us of the Holocaust and its aftermath. The shadowed paths traced by these writers raise complicated questions about ambivalence, absence, memory, secularity, and citizenship. In their writing, the urban landscape itself bears witness to the absent Jews, and what happened to them. For the writers treated in this volume, neither their Frenchness nor their Jewishness is a fixed point. Focusing on Paris's dual role as both a cultural hub and a powerful symbol of hope and conflict in Jewish memory, the contributors address intersections and departures among these writers. Their complexity of thought, artistry, and depth of vision shape a new understanding of the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish and French identity, on literature and literary forms, and on the development of Jewish secular culture in Western Europe.
