Modernist form and the myth of Jewification [electronic resource] / Neil Levi.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Machine generated contents note: -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Phobic Reading, Modernist Form, and the Figure of the Antisemite -- Part I: Modernist Form as Judaization -- 1. Genealogies: Judaization, Wagner, Nordau -- 2. Jews, Art, and History: The Nazi Exhibition of "Degenerate Art" as Historicopolitical Spectacle -- 3. Fanatical Abstraction: Wyndham Lewis's Critique of Modernist Form as Judaization in Time and Western Man -- Part II: Modernist Form and the Antisemitic Imagination -- 4. Straw Men: Projection, Personification, and Narrative Form in Ulysses -- 5. Images of the Bilderverbot: Adorno, Antisemitism, and the Enemies of Modernism -- 6. The Labor of Late Modernist Poetics: Beckett after Celine -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

"This book argues that the antisemitic interpretation of modernist form as a symptom of a mobile, contagious Jewish spirit needs to be treated as integral to the history of European modernism. The notion of modernist form as Jewified lies at the heart of both a certain modernism's hostile reception, and its self-conception"-- Provided by publisher.

"Why were modernist works of art, literature, and music that were neither by nor about Jews nevertheless interpreted as Jewish? In this book, Neil Levi explores how the antisemitic fantasy of a mobile, dangerous, contagious Jewish spirit unfolds in the antimodernist polemics of Richard Wagner, Max Nordau, Wyndham Lewis, and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, reaching its apotheosis in the notorious 1937 Nazi exhibition "Degenerate Art." Levi then turns to James Joyce, Theodor W. Adorno, and Samuel Beckett, offering radical new interpretations of these modernist authors to show how each presents his own poetics as a self-conscious departure from the modern antisemitic imaginary. Levi claims that, just as antisemites once feared their own contamination by a mobile, polluting Jewish spirit, so too much of postwar thought remains governed by the fear that it might be contaminated by the spirit of antisemitism. Thus he argues for the need to confront and work through our own fantasies and projections not only about the figure of the Jew but also about that of the antisemite"-- Provided by publisher.

Description based on print version record.