For Friedrich Nietzsche, the place to clear out one’s mind and find oneself or one’s calling (so to speak) is in the mountains. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, the main figure, Zarathustra, goes into the mountains and has his epiphany. In the mountains, Zarathustra takes on the serious task of becoming himself. However, he also learns […]
When I first read Paul Auster’s “Pages for Kafka,” I was struck by the fact that, although he mentioned Kafka’s name in his title, he didn’t make any reference to Kafka’s name throughout the piece. Instead, Auster refers to “he” and “him” repeatedly. Here is one instance, which I cited in my last blog entry: […]
With the rise of anti-semitism in America – which I have experienced, personally; and see on social media, perpetually – I have been starting to think more about what it is and what we can do to – if possible – counter-act it. One era that I have studied in depth and written on in […]
Abish is, for me – and several others like John Updike, Harold Bloom, et al, – one of the greatest fiction writers in America in the 20th century…that (not) many people knew about. He is a writer for writers, for those of us who love language. In a truly Derridian sense, Abish was a master […]
I arrived in Budapest last Thursday and on Friday I started my Graduate Seminar on “The Schlemiel in European Literature and Culture” at the Ashkenazium Program (which includes several notable Jewish Studies, Philosophy, and Literature scholars on its faculty such as Elliot Wolfson, Paul Franks, Shaul Magid, Peter Trawny, Susan Handelman, etc.) To give an […]
I can’t seem to get smallness out of my mind. It’s not simply an obsession. The Kabbalists of Safed and also Kafka knew that. The notion of “tsimtsum” (also spelled “tzimtzum”), in particular, addresses smallness and contraction in terms of a dynamic (a movement from one state to another). It emerges in JS Foer’s recent […]
Translating Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin’s notion of the flaneur into the language of the digital world, Kenneth Goldsmith argues that the flaneur “is hardwired into the ethos of the Internet”(65, Wasting Time on the Internet). We are, like the flanuer, constantly “browsing.” But as we do we become smaller and less noticeable. Goldsmith, drawing […]
At the outset of Berlin Childhood around 1900, Walter Benjamin suggests that something out of his past was calling to him and that he had decided to surrender himself to it. His memory has a narcotic affect. But it is teaching him something. Peter Szondi argues that, for Benjamin, the “search for time past is […]
Motl the Cantor’s Son is Sholem Aleichem’s last novel. Though unfinished,it is substantial. It tells the story of Motl – the orphan of a Cantor who died back in Europe (in fact, on the same day as the Baal Shem Tov was said to have tied – the second day of Shavuot) – and his […]
Extreme difference in size or scale is a staple of comedy, caricature, folklore, and literature. The Brothers Grimm, for instance, tell many stories about small people who comically stumble through the world and are thought not just to be small in scale but small minded. Take, for instance, “The Seven Swabians,” a story about how […]
Schlemiel Theory 