Unlimited

Authorized users

Can lend chapters, not whole ebooks

Homer, Humanism, Holocaust : Jewish responses to the crisis of enlightenment during world war ii.

9783031114731 (electronic bk.)
3031114736 (electronic bk.)
3031114728
9783031114724

Cham, Switzerland : Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.

English

1 online resource

10.1007/978-3-031-11473-1 doi

D804.3

940.531801

This book examines how Jewish intellectuals during and after the Second World War reinterpreted Homers epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, in light of their own wartime experiences, drawing a parallel between the ancient Greek genocide of the Trojans and the Nazi genocide of the Jews. The wartime writings of Theodore Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Erich Auerbach, Rachel Bespaloff, Hermann Broch, Max Horkheimer, Primo Levi, and others were attempts both to understand the collapse of European civilization and the Enlightenment through critiques of their foundational texts and to imagine the place of the Homeric epics in a new post-War humanism. The book thus also explores the reception of these writers, analyzing how Jewish child-survivors like Geoffrey Hartman and Helene Cixous and writers of the post-Holocaust generation like Daniel Mendelsohn continued to read the epics as narratives of grief, trauma, and woundedness into the twenty-first century. Adam J. Goldwyn is Associate Professor of English at North Dakota State University, USA. He is the author of Byzantine Ecocriticism: Women, Nature, and Power in the Medieval Greek Romance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and Witness Literature in Byzantium: Narrating Slaves, Prisoners, and Refugees (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), and co-editor of Mediterranean Modernism: Intercultural Exchange and Aesthetic Development (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). .

Access limited to authorized users.

Print version: 9783031114731
Print version: 9783031114724

Online Resources > Ebooks
All Resources