Elliot R. Wolfson : poetic thinking /
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Elliot R. Wolfson is Professor of Religious Studies and the Marsha and Jay Glazer Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A scholar of Jewish mysticism and philosophy, he uses the textual sources of Judaism to examine universal philosophical topics such as the function and processes of the imagination, the paradoxes of temporality, and the mystery of poetic language. Working at the intersection of disciplines and refusing to reduce texts to their simple historical contexts, Wolfson puts texts spanning diverse temporal, cultural, and religious periods in creative counterpoint. His sensitivity to language reveals its fragility as it simultaneously points to the uncertainty of meaning. The result is a creative reading of both Judaism and philosophy that informs and is informed by poetic sensibility and philosophical hermeneutics.
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1 online resource (xv, 254 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references. :
9789004291058 :
2213-6010 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The memory of pain : women's testimonies of the Holocaust /
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In this book, Camila Loew analyzes four women's testimonial literary writings on the Holocaust to examine and question some of the tenets of the fields of Holocaust studies, gender studies, and testimony. Through a close reading of the works of Charlotte Delbo, Margarete Buber-Neumann, Ruth Klüger, and Marguerite Duras, Loew foregrounds these authors' search for a written form to engage with their experiences of the extreme. Although each chapter contains its individual focus and features, the book possesses a unity in intention, concerns, and consequences. In the theoretical introduction that unites the four chapters, Loew eschews essentialism and revises the emergence of the field of Women and Holocaust studies from the early 1980s on, and signals some of its shortcomings. In response, and in accordance with a recent turn in various disciplines of the Humanities, Loew highlights the ethical dimension of testimony and its responsible commitment to the other. In dealing with the texts as literary testimonies-a complex genre, between literature and history-, testimony is freed from the obligation to respond to the requirements of factual truth, and becomes a privileged form to voice the traumatic event, and to symbolically explore the role of excess.
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1 online resource (xxii, 227 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. 191-205) and index. :
9789401207065 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.