Up until his departure in 2003 for Bar Ilan University, James Kugel was teaching Biblical Criticism at Harvard University for two decades (where he was the Harry M. Starr Professor Emeritus of Classical and Modern Hebrew Literature). His book, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now, draws on these two decades […]
When I was an undergraduate, I remember reading James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and wondering whether art could be reconciled with religion. In my studies, I came across several arguments that insisted on separating the two. Soren Kierkegaard, in his book Either/Or, puts aesthetics in a battle with faith and […]
Irony often plays on the gap between expectation and reality. The gap between is a commonplace in much schlemiel fiction. Playing on the main motif of How Should a Person Be? Sheila Heti, the main character and author of the novel, casts the other as her teacher. She looks for ethical and artistic models of […]
Sheila Heti – the author, narrator, and main character of the comic novel How Should a Person Be? – has fears that if she trusts someone, she may hurt someone and hurt herself. But, as we learn from the prologue, she has to if she is to learn how a person should be. She doesn’t […]
One of the major tasks of the modern Enlightenment project is to “demythologize.” As a part of this project all types of myths are challenged. They need not be changed by science, the humanities, and psychology, however. The greatest battling ground for challenging mythology may be in the medium that is used to convey myth; […]
Success and failure – winning and losing – define our lives and how we think of ourselves. But sometimes one blurs into the other. One of Bob Dylan’s most quoted lyrics – from his song “Love Minus Zero” – addresses the paradox of success and failure: “She knows there’s no success like failure and that […]
I can remember the first time I ever heard a story about the Jewish fool otherwise known as a schlemiel. What struck me about the story, when I first heard it (when I was six or seven years old), was that the schlemiel wasn’t an independent agent. He lived amidst other schlemiels – in a […]
When I first started reading Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? I was struck by the title, the first words of the novel, and their speaker, the main character, who is an amalgamation of fiction and non-fiction: her name is Sheila Heti. Her book, published in 2012, has received great reviews by The New […]
David Heti is an (un)timely comedian. His comedy speaks to a time that is becoming more and more unhappy with itself. (And I mean this in a good way since I believe that such unhappiness will prompt us to come out of our dogmatic slumber…and think.) Unlike many comedians whose jokes are purely scatological and […]
I’m not an intellectual historian. And while I enjoy reading intellectual history, I always worry about the problem of periodization. Like any historicization, the risk is to say that on this or that date everything changed with this or that thinker. The problem with such claims is that – in a Derridian sense – something […]
Schlemiel Theory 