This chapter examines the possible connections between the staging of cat-mouse and cat-rat pairi... more This chapter examines the possible connections between the staging of cat-mouse and cat-rat pairings by Franz Kafka and Heinrich Heine, on the one hand, and the asymmetrical and often violent power relations between Gentiles and Jews, on the other. It first, by means of a deconstruction of Michael Schmidt’s new-historicist article on Kafka’s “Little Fable,” interpellates Kafka’s posthumously published piece into a number of intertextual (including his letters to Milena Jesenská and the fragment “The Giant Mole”) and extratextual networks in order to suggest linkages between it and his situation as a Jew in Germanophone Central Europe in the early twentieth century. It then situates a late (c. 1852–55), also posthumously published, poem by Heine, “From the Age of Pigtails,” that he labeled a “fable” over and against the Jews’ acquisition and subsequent partial loss of civil rights in the first quarter of the nineteenth century as well as in relation to the tragic fate of Ludwig Marcus that accompanied the rise and fall of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden. Bridging these two analyses is a discussion of the swarm of “Rat-” phonemes and morphemes that plagued Freud’s “Rat Man” case study and notes.
This work was originally published as Geller, Jay. 1994. "Of Mice and Mensa: Antisemitism an... more This work was originally published as Geller, Jay. 1994. "Of Mice and Mensa: Antisemitism and the Jewish Genius." Centennial Review 38: 361 - 85.
This work was originally published as Geller, Jay. 2002. "Postmemories of the Holocaust - Pr... more This work was originally published as Geller, Jay. 2002. "Postmemories of the Holocaust - Preface." American Imago 59 (3).
This work was originally published as Geller, Jay. 2011. "Glorious, Accursed Europe. A Study... more This work was originally published as Geller, Jay. 2011. "Glorious, Accursed Europe. A Study in Jewish Ambivalence." German Studies Review 34 (2): 471-72.
This chapter undertakes close readings of Kafka’s first and last published animal narratives, The... more This chapter undertakes close readings of Kafka’s first and last published animal narratives, The Metamorphosis and “Josephine the Singer.” It focuses upon the different strategies by which Kafka rendered any species determination of the stories’ protagonists, Gregor Samsa and Josephine (as well as her people), indefinite and how he thereby confronted his prospective readers with the constructedness of both human/animal difference and species essentialism. These works are then seen as interventions, whether effectively or not, against an apparatus that these two constructs conditioned, an apparatus that helped naturalize both Gentile/Jew difference and the violent means sustaining it: the identification of the Jew-Animal. It situates these stories over and against historical and literary associations of Jews with vermin (Ungeziefer) and mice as well as in relation to Kafka’s own encounters with such creatures recorded in his letters and in his posthumously published story “The Burrow.” The chapter also includes a discussion of how at the opening of Maus II Art Spiegelman subverted possible essentialist identification of Jews with mice by his readers.
This chapter engages another instrumentalization of Kafka’s animal figures for contemporary cultu... more This chapter engages another instrumentalization of Kafka’s animal figures for contemporary cultural-political ends, Jens Hanssen’s scavenged-together anti-Zionist reading of “Jackals and Arabs.” Against Hanssen’s article, it reads Kafka’s “animal story” and Hanssen’s own sources as well as draws upon genre analysis. It complicates the frequent (including Hanssen’s) identification of the story’s jackals with the Jews by, for example, their apparent shared emphasis on eating habits. Among the means employed are an examination of Robertson Smith’s classic account of a Saracen Arab sacrifice and consumption of a camel repeated in Freud’s Totem and Taboo and an analysis of Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog” that also reveals refractions of Kafka’s critique of Brod’s The Jewesses. The chapter further problematizes Kafka’s alleged identification of dogs and Jews (that a Max Brod mistranscription had exacerbated) by contextualizing Kafka’s most quoted canine invocation, Josef K’s dying “Like a dog!” in The Trial. The chapter finally argues for the anti-allegorical force and function of Kafka’s allegedly “Jewish jackals.”
Taking its lead from analyses of gift exchange by Marcel Mauss and Marshall Sahlins as well as of... more Taking its lead from analyses of gift exchange by Marcel Mauss and Marshall Sahlins as well as of contact by Charles Long and Jonathan Z Smith, this article elaborates a theory of the exchange, among dominant social subjects, of representations of their subjected proximate others in order to rectify the crisis precipitated by contact with otherness that threatens their claims to autonomy, authority, homogeneity, and universality. Specifically it situates the polemical exchange of representations of women among Friedrich Schlegel (Lucinde/Lucinde), G W F Hegel (Antigone/ Phenomenology of Spirit), and Karl Gutzkow (Wally/Wally the Skeptic) as exemplary German male bourgeois efforts to rectify the crises to subject formation generated, in part, by the emergence of gender-coded bifurcated bourgeois society and signaled by the Kantian and French Revolutions. The public dissemination of apotropaic representations screened the dependence upon proximate others by, and determined the positions among, exchange participants as well as maintained structures of domination.
... Outside of Vanderbilt, I have received much intellectual supplementation from Ju-dith Frishma... more ... Outside of Vanderbilt, I have received much intellectual supplementation from Ju-dith Frishman, Madge Dresser, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Anne Hoffman, Eliza Slavet, Robin Judd, Paul Reitter, Finbarr Curtis, William Robert, Frank Scherer, Diane O'Donoghue, Gerhard Fichtner ...
This chapter examines the possible connections between the staging of cat-mouse and cat-rat pairi... more This chapter examines the possible connections between the staging of cat-mouse and cat-rat pairings by Franz Kafka and Heinrich Heine, on the one hand, and the asymmetrical and often violent power relations between Gentiles and Jews, on the other. It first, by means of a deconstruction of Michael Schmidt’s new-historicist article on Kafka’s “Little Fable,” interpellates Kafka’s posthumously published piece into a number of intertextual (including his letters to Milena Jesenská and the fragment “The Giant Mole”) and extratextual networks in order to suggest linkages between it and his situation as a Jew in Germanophone Central Europe in the early twentieth century. It then situates a late (c. 1852–55), also posthumously published, poem by Heine, “From the Age of Pigtails,” that he labeled a “fable” over and against the Jews’ acquisition and subsequent partial loss of civil rights in the first quarter of the nineteenth century as well as in relation to the tragic fate of Ludwig Marcus that accompanied the rise and fall of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden. Bridging these two analyses is a discussion of the swarm of “Rat-” phonemes and morphemes that plagued Freud’s “Rat Man” case study and notes.
This work was originally published as Geller, Jay. 1994. "Of Mice and Mensa: Antisemitism an... more This work was originally published as Geller, Jay. 1994. "Of Mice and Mensa: Antisemitism and the Jewish Genius." Centennial Review 38: 361 - 85.
This work was originally published as Geller, Jay. 2002. "Postmemories of the Holocaust - Pr... more This work was originally published as Geller, Jay. 2002. "Postmemories of the Holocaust - Preface." American Imago 59 (3).
This work was originally published as Geller, Jay. 2011. "Glorious, Accursed Europe. A Study... more This work was originally published as Geller, Jay. 2011. "Glorious, Accursed Europe. A Study in Jewish Ambivalence." German Studies Review 34 (2): 471-72.
This chapter undertakes close readings of Kafka’s first and last published animal narratives, The... more This chapter undertakes close readings of Kafka’s first and last published animal narratives, The Metamorphosis and “Josephine the Singer.” It focuses upon the different strategies by which Kafka rendered any species determination of the stories’ protagonists, Gregor Samsa and Josephine (as well as her people), indefinite and how he thereby confronted his prospective readers with the constructedness of both human/animal difference and species essentialism. These works are then seen as interventions, whether effectively or not, against an apparatus that these two constructs conditioned, an apparatus that helped naturalize both Gentile/Jew difference and the violent means sustaining it: the identification of the Jew-Animal. It situates these stories over and against historical and literary associations of Jews with vermin (Ungeziefer) and mice as well as in relation to Kafka’s own encounters with such creatures recorded in his letters and in his posthumously published story “The Burrow.” The chapter also includes a discussion of how at the opening of Maus II Art Spiegelman subverted possible essentialist identification of Jews with mice by his readers.
This chapter engages another instrumentalization of Kafka’s animal figures for contemporary cultu... more This chapter engages another instrumentalization of Kafka’s animal figures for contemporary cultural-political ends, Jens Hanssen’s scavenged-together anti-Zionist reading of “Jackals and Arabs.” Against Hanssen’s article, it reads Kafka’s “animal story” and Hanssen’s own sources as well as draws upon genre analysis. It complicates the frequent (including Hanssen’s) identification of the story’s jackals with the Jews by, for example, their apparent shared emphasis on eating habits. Among the means employed are an examination of Robertson Smith’s classic account of a Saracen Arab sacrifice and consumption of a camel repeated in Freud’s Totem and Taboo and an analysis of Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog” that also reveals refractions of Kafka’s critique of Brod’s The Jewesses. The chapter further problematizes Kafka’s alleged identification of dogs and Jews (that a Max Brod mistranscription had exacerbated) by contextualizing Kafka’s most quoted canine invocation, Josef K’s dying “Like a dog!” in The Trial. The chapter finally argues for the anti-allegorical force and function of Kafka’s allegedly “Jewish jackals.”
Taking its lead from analyses of gift exchange by Marcel Mauss and Marshall Sahlins as well as of... more Taking its lead from analyses of gift exchange by Marcel Mauss and Marshall Sahlins as well as of contact by Charles Long and Jonathan Z Smith, this article elaborates a theory of the exchange, among dominant social subjects, of representations of their subjected proximate others in order to rectify the crisis precipitated by contact with otherness that threatens their claims to autonomy, authority, homogeneity, and universality. Specifically it situates the polemical exchange of representations of women among Friedrich Schlegel (Lucinde/Lucinde), G W F Hegel (Antigone/ Phenomenology of Spirit), and Karl Gutzkow (Wally/Wally the Skeptic) as exemplary German male bourgeois efforts to rectify the crises to subject formation generated, in part, by the emergence of gender-coded bifurcated bourgeois society and signaled by the Kantian and French Revolutions. The public dissemination of apotropaic representations screened the dependence upon proximate others by, and determined the positions among, exchange participants as well as maintained structures of domination.
... Outside of Vanderbilt, I have received much intellectual supplementation from Ju-dith Frishma... more ... Outside of Vanderbilt, I have received much intellectual supplementation from Ju-dith Frishman, Madge Dresser, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Anne Hoffman, Eliza Slavet, Robin Judd, Paul Reitter, Finbarr Curtis, William Robert, Frank Scherer, Diane O'Donoghue, Gerhard Fichtner ...
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