Inventing Tradition: Contemporary Russian-Jewish Literature
14.99 €
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Inventing Tradition: Contemporary Russian-Jewish Literature
14.99 €
How does literature deal with Jewish tradition after a long period of assimilation, the Holocaust, and the official (semi-)ban on Jewishness under communism? The process of ≪reinventing tradition≫ begins among the late-Soviet Jewish underground of the 1960s-1970s and continues, as the prose of the 2000s-2010s shows, until the present. It is explained by the fact that Jewish literature is created for the reader of the ≪posthuman≫ era, when knowledge about Jewishness and Judaism is transmitted and received no longer from living bearers of tradition, but from books, paintings, films, museums, and popular culture. Such ≪posthistorical≫ knowledge, however, is the result not only of political catastrophes, official oblivion, and dictatorship, but also of secularization, the cultural recycling of tradition characteristic of the (post)modern era. It combines reconstruction with myth-making, cultural translation with practices of creating a secondary - culturally mediated - collective ≪remembrance≫, scholarly commentary with folklorization. Placing Russian-Jewish literature within the general macro-cultural framework of the era, the author turns to the theory of humanitarian thought of recent decades: the cultural semiotics of Yuri Lotman and Boris Ouspensky, works on myth by Mircea Eliade, Kenneth White's geopoetics, the theories of cultural memory by Aleida and Jan Assmann, Marianne Hirsch's postmemory, postcolonial and post-imperial studies, and the legacy of poststructuralism. Klavdia Smola is a philologist and cultural critic, professor and head of the Department of Slavic Literatures at the University of Dresden (Germany).
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- All books by the publisher
- All books by the author
- All books in the series Research Library