Documents found
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91.More information
ABSTRACTThis brief article maps out some of the central concerns and questions raised in two relatively recent anthologies of essays by major intellectuals, film scholars and historians. In addition to problematizing the representation of history and audio-visual media, these two anthologies examplify the circulation of ideas, the bridges as well as the divisions between the interests of academic inquiry in North America and Europe. What seems to be a common preoccupation, the weight of history in cinema, is only the marker of a clear line of division which is emblematic of divergent values and institutional orientations.
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92.More information
AbstractCritics exploring the relationship between Romantic poetry and Judaism have noted several places within William Blake's poetry that seem to display philo-Semetic tendencies. This essay argues that Blake's relationship with Jewish thought is much more complicated. It utilizes Spinoza's understanding of the affect to rethink the contexts of Blake's remarks about Judaism and “the Jew.” For Spinoza, the problem of the affect is a problem of reading and understanding what one is reading. This is particularly difficult, since the affects only confusedly make up what is called “the body”—whether this is a corporeal, political, or epistemological body. He applies this affectual problem of reading to his study of Biblical texts in the Theological Political Treatise, noting that Jewish law, in particular the Decalogue, only applies to the time and place of its production. Despite this, there are attempts to make a coherent message out of the Decalogue that can be transmitted outside of its spatio-temporal context. Blake has similar comments to make about the textual production of the Bible. According to Blake, the Bible is not a coherent document, and is rather made to be coherent by political bodies wishing to make a single, docile Christian identity. This paper uses these comments by Blake and Spinoza in a close reading of what is seemingly the most obvious example of Blake's philo-semetic ideas: his address “To the Jews” in Jerusalem. I argue that whatever comments Blake makes about Jewish identity cannot be read outside of the complicated biopolitical contexts emerging from the address. Readers must fashion a disciplinary body for Blake that has philo-semetic beliefs and believe that this body pre-exists the time and space of its textual production in order to make conclusions about Blake's relationship to Judaism. This process is precisely what Blake critiques in the essay.
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94.More information
The economy of William Gaddis's novels take at face value the radical absence of any transcending residuum of meaning. This essay attempts to show how the breakdown of the father figure (which served as a kind of touchstone for testing reality) crigenders a confusing worid of signifiers whose unreliability the dialogical structure of the text reinforces. With the Halloween masquerade going full swing, characters and settings fall under the spell of words whose sole reference is to their own recurrences, making any representation as such questionable. In the absence of any authoritative authorial voice enabling us to discriminate the genuine from the false, our perception of the diegesis is blurred. Hence no truth is admissible save, insofar as it lits into an aesthetic of counterfeit.
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95.More information
This essay looks at post 2005 restitution exhibitions of art believed or known to be owned by Jews stolen during National Socialist times in order to examine complex questions and layered relationships involving private property, public institutions and museum display.
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One of the most iconic events in the history of anti-Semitism in Quebec was the 1934 strike by interns at Notre-Dame Hospital. They were opposed to the presence of a Jewish physician, Dr. Samuel Rabinovitch. This article examines both archival sources and commentary in the contemporary press to arrive at a better understanding of the event from multiple perspectives, namely those of the Jewish community, French Canadian leaders (at the hospital, at the Université de Montréal, and within the Catholic Church), members of the wider French-Canadian community, and English-speaking Canadians.
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