20th Century Jewish writing
Wednesday, July 16
Each panel is broken down into different talks, questions and responses. The audio for each section is found at the bottom its box.
Italo Svevo and the Psychological Racialization of Jewish Consciousness
by David Buyze.
Svevo’s novel, Zeno’s Conscience is a global narrative that portrays the interiority of consciousness and life in the contemporary world in overcoming negative discourses on identity and how they have impacted modern and postmodern subjectivity and consciousness. This is an ongoing project and the elaboration of it will also bear further relevance to the Jews in Venice and the historical and theoretical paradigms that are at stake.
Paper
Towards a Definition of the Jewish Italian Writer
by Katherine Jason.
The Queer Among Us: Homosexuality in 20th-Century Italian Jewish Texts
by John Champagne.
What might it mean to “queer” Italian Jewish Studies? If we adopted from queer theory a rigorous interrogation of the oppositions in which we habitually work—not simply oppositions like heterosexual/homosexual, but also Christian/Jew, male/female, secular/religious, orthodox/reformed, history/literature—what new knowledge might present itself, what new objects of study might appear, and what new questions might animate our efforts? While these questions are far too broad to be answered in an essay of this length, they nonetheless animate this preliminary attempt to use both queer theory and Jewish Literature to complicate any simplistic understanding of Italian Jewish identity.
The Queer Among Us Paper
A Post-Holocaust Hewbrew Shylock
by Yael Chaver.
Over the centuries Jews have responded in various ways to the Merchant of Venice and its perceived anti-Semitic elements. My interest is in three mid-20th-century responses, which developed in succession: the novel Shylock, the Jew of Venice by the popular Hebrew writer Ari Ibn-Zahav, which is a post-Holocaust, Zionist-oriented reworking of Shakespeare’s play.
Post-Holocaust Hewbrew Shylock Paper
The Actor's Nightmare: Playing Shylock
by Robert Levine.
Audio for Panel Discussion
Postcolonial and Jewish studies: Secret Sharers (or "The importance of Being Venice")
by Bryan Cheyette.
Audio for Panel Discussion
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