Anticlerical illustrations and visual satire in ‘anti-Jewish affairs’

This thesis investigates the expression of anticlerical ideas in visual satire of ‘anti-Jewish’ political affairs in France between 1880 and 1906. Focusing predominantly on the Dreyfus polemic in Third Republican France, it responds to the following questions: what anticlerical ideas were articulated in the cartoons and illustrations? Why were they being expressed? How were these represented visually? The role of the Church and the religious press, secularisation and laicisation, notions of identity, leftist intellectual hubs, and how the clergy were represented are examined in the satirical art. Antimilitary ideas, a key theme in Dreyfusard protests, are also scrutinised in the art. Images from periodicals, newspapers, posters, postcards and book illustrations are examined from the period in question as well as material drawn from anti-Jewish controversies between 1840 and 1914. Henri-Gabriel Ibels’ work forms a major component of the data which incorporates Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfusard satirical art. The main pillar has a supplementary dimension in discerning whether a flow of ideas existed between Ibels’ work and leading Dreyfusard, Emile Zola. Zola’s open letters à la jeunesse and à la France are used as main sources to his thinking. A secondary pillar interrogates the polemical art to examine competing representations of the Jewish individual and Jewishness amidst the socio-political tensions of modernising Europe. The study decodes the visual tropes and narratives to ‘other’ the Jew at this formative moment in the history of the French nation-state

'Standing accused': analogy and dialogue as the personhood of substance

This thesis engages the issue of personhood, arguing that persons are both analogical and dialogical beings. I look at personhood first, from the standpoint of the slandered and 'accused' person. Beginning with the scene of Christ before Pilate, I show that the logic of accusation is unassailably couched within the grammar of testimony or of bearing witness (Chapter 1). Next, I treat the Dreyfus Affair and the contrast of mystique and politique in the writings of Charles Peguy (Chapter 2). Here I tum to the 'accusation in the accusative' logic of Emmanuel Levinas, demonstrating that within an approach of radical alterity to the exclusion of other grammatico-ontological cases, the person becomes lost without some sort of original, analogical case of 'giving' (Chapter 3). In response to extreme accounts slander and of the heterogeneity of the person, this thesis, secondly, proposes that the person should be understood first analogically, and secondly, as an analogical extension, dialogically. To this end I examine the debate concerning analogy in Thomas Aquinas and the tradition that followed him. I explore both the metaphysical path of resolutio, perfection, and theological recapitulation (Chapter 4), and then look to the debate on analogy itself arguing that it is best understood as pointing toward an analogia entis that is coextensively an analogia personae (Chapter 5). Finally, I conclude with an articulation of the person as dialogical. I look first to the form of dialogue in Plato, then I conclude with three sections enacting a 'call and response' of the divine persons speaking 'to the creature through the creature', where I end with an account of persons living a dialogically ensouled life within the communio personarum (Chapter 6). I finish with a brief conclusion recapitulating the argument with a Christie entreaty toward the neighbor

Media and Message in Modern Political Thought: From the Age of Print to the Age of Digital Reproduction

The dissertation investigates the relationship between media and message in modern political thought. In the research I situate the ideas of three modern political theorists Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, and Theodor Herzl in the material conditions prevailing in the printing industry of their times. I investigate in each case how the media culture the thinker was working in influenced his political ideas. My findings indicate that in all three cases the political ideas were shaped and conditioned by the particular position of the author, the prevailing attitude to the printed word, and the existing media technologies. Based on the historical research, in the last part of the study I explore the future of political ideas in the age of digital hypertexts. Overall, the findings of the research lead me to call for a broadening of conventional analysis of political ideas: Political ideas must be seen as part of the highly regulated streams of information that flow between author and reader in any given historical period

Experience on trial: criminal law and the modernist novel

The cultural forms of modernity become truly modern only when specific experience, as opposed to tradition or faith, is made the basis of epistemological authority. By taking the primary examples of law and literature, this thesis argues that the criminal trial and realist novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries perfectly conform to this statement. But by the early twentieth-century, experience had, as Walter Benjamin put it, ‘fallen in value’. As such, the modernist novel and trial come to have foundations in a non-experience which nullifies identity, subverts repetition and supplants presence with absence. The philosophical basis of experience, its fundamental basis within the novel and trial, and the theoretical manifestations of its dissolving, are outlined in the substantial Introduction to this thesis. Chapter One then specifically examines E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) within the context of the administration of justice in British India. Adela Quested’s supposed assault within the Marabar cave is argued to be a non-event which in no way conforms to the modern sense of experience outlined in the Introduction. This resonates with the state of the trial in British India, in which many magistrates became convinced of the rampant perjury of the natives, turning their decisions into a matter of deciding between the less untrue of two false accounts. Like the non-event in the Marabar cave, the crime that was supposedly at the heart of the trial, the experience at its core, was thus slipping from view. In the second part of Chapter One, it is argued that in his theoretical work, Aspects of the Novel (1927), Forster, responding to anxieties about the novel’s experiential loss, attempted to codify the laws of the realism. This project had much in common with the Acts of legal codification that took place in British India in the 1860s and ‘70s, particularly that of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen’s Indian Evidence Act 1872, which sought to retain a form of representation that was congruent with a traditional conception of experience, thus safeguarding judgment. In Chapter Two, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) is analysed in the light of legal developments in expert witnessing and criminal identification. One of the specific issues of Ford’s novel is the kind of identity it portrays. Without commensurable experiences that can be reasonably assimilated and communicated, the identities of The Good Soldier resist the common recognition of a realist character. Legal developments in the attribution of responsibility and the identification of criminals are argued to parallel the methods by which Ford’s ‘Literary Impressionism’, by contrast, provides the image of his actors. In many ways, these issues were matters for expert witnesses, a growing number of whom were taking the stand in British courts. By taking judgment out of the hand of the layman, expertise was supplanting experience. But this was not limited to the legal forum – in the final part of Chapter Two it is suggested that Ford’s novel, itself, responds to a sense of expert reading. Chapter Three discusses Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927) in connection to two points of legal interest. Firstly, the Dreyfus case, which, in its reliance upon absent evidence parallels the denigration of presence that exists in Proust’s novel. Secondly, Dreyfus’ supporters, in calling for a re-trial, asked for a certain form of repetition to take place. The repetitious legal forms of review, appeal, and precedent are then examined in relation to the various forms of repetition that exist within Proust’s work. By utilising Platonic, Nietzschean, and Freudian theories of repetition, it is argued that experience has truly fallen in value when the origins of repetition can be only obliquely discerned. In the Conclusion, the continuity of a realist tradition, and a modernist impulse of non-experience, will be traced in contemporary works – Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) and The Staircase (2005), a documentary film by Jean-Xavier De Lestrade about a real murder trial in North Carolina. Finally, a view is offered of the future of experience in the novel and courtroom: one which, based upon John D. Caputo’s reading of Jacques Derrida’s work, stresses the ethical nature of doing truth and making reality in the very act of allowing experience to slip away

Reactions to anarchism in the works of Maurice Barres and Georges Darien,1885-1914.

This thesis looks at the fiction of two very different authors, Maurice Barrés (1862-1923) and Georges Darien (1862-1921). Despite their posthumous reputations (Barrés the proto-fascist, Darien the anarchist individualist), the ideological and literary development of both these writers have their roots in their reactions to anarchism. In this thesis, I examine the effect these reactions to anarchism had on their status in the champ littéraire, their politics and the construction of their texts. In the opening chapter, I address the overarching issues of the nature of anarchism, political engagement and the champ littéraire of fin-de-sìècle Paris. I refer to secondary sources such as Pierre Bourdieu, Susan Rubin Suleiman and Richard Sonn to inform my inquiry. I also establish the historical framework of this period, including Boulangism, the Dreyfus Affair, nationalism and anarchism. The second chapter examines the lives and careers of Maurice Barrés and Georges Darien in the context of the champ littéraire. The following chapters all examine issues which both Barrés and Darien privileged in their fiction. The writers' treatment of the self, education, crime and corruption and national identity are discussed through a detailed comparison of two texts in each chapter. This discussion takes place within the context of both authors’ engagement with and reactions to anarchism. Throughout this thesis, my method is a close and comparative reading of selected passages taken from significant novels and didactic works

T.S. Eliot and the Jews: A study in anti-Semitism and literary form

Eliot wrote some diversely anti-Semitic poems. They are offensive. In his work, Jews tend to be contemptible rather than frightening. Its anti-Semitism is neither marginal nor especially typical of its time. It is not analogous to misogyny (chapter 1), For certain reasons, Jewish critics have been reluctant to acknowledge Eliot's anti-Semitism. "Gerontion"'s anti-Semitism, and its relation to the form of the dramatic monologue, may be explored by reference to Genesis 22 and Browning. "A Song for Simeon" consummates Eliot's anti-Semitism by placing Jews entirely within the Christian story (chapter 2). The belief that poetry, or good poetry, does not make statements supports the view that Eliot's poetry is not anti-Semitic. "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" proves that this view is false. Anyway, anti-Semitism itself is not wholly propositional. It is compatible with a Symbolist imagination. In Eliot's case, as "Burbank" demonstrates, it is evidence of such an imagination in crisis (chapter 3). Eliot's anti-Semitic poems are ugly, the principal fruits of his "contemplation of the horrid or sordid or disgusting" (The Sacred Wood). "Gerontion" and "Dirge" exemplify this anti-aesthetic of ugliness. Eliot's poetry exploits anti-Semitism to literary effect; his prose does not. For example, anti-Semitism blinded Eliot to Jewish suffering in Nazi Germany (chapter 4). Eliot's anti-Semitic prose makes the "free-thinking Jew" the target. (This contrasts with the myopic, insensate philistinism of the Jews in the poems). Neither Freud nor Benda nor even Spinoza escape Eliot's scorn. In After Strange Gods the "free-thinking Jew" is the figure of that text's instability (chapter 5). Both the literary and the extra-literary evidence that Eliot regretted his work's anti-Semitism is ambiguous. There are reasons why it may have been difficult for Eliot to repudiate it (chapter 6)

Holocaust Denial

Holocaust Denial: The Politics of Perfidy provides a graphic and compelling global panorama of past and present variations on this toxic phenomenon. The volume examines right and left wing French negationism, post-Communist Holocaust deniers in Eastern-Europe, the spread of denial to Australia, Canada, South-Africa and even to Japan. Leading scholarly experts also explore the close connection between Holocaust denial, global conspiracy theories, antisemitism and radical anti-Zionism, especially in Iran and the Arab world

The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity, Volume 2: Medieval Meets Medievalism

This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life. Jan Ziolkowski tracks the poem from its medieval roots to its rediscovery in late nineteenth-century Paris, before its translation into English in Britain and the United States. The visual influence of the tale on Gothic revivalism and vice versa in America is carefully documented with lavish and inventive illustrations, and Ziolkowski concludes with an examination of the explosion of interest in The Juggler of Notre Dame in the twentieth century and its place in mass culture today. The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity is a rich case study for the reception of the Middle Ages in modernity. Spanning centuries and continents, the medieval period is understood through the lens of its (post)modern reception in Europe and America. Profound connections between the verbal and the visual are illustrated by a rich trove of images, including book illustrations, stained glass, postage stamps, architecture, and Christmas cards. Presented with great clarity and simplicity, Ziolkowski\u27s work is accessible to the general reader, while its many new discoveries will be valuable to academics in such fields and disciplines as medieval studies, medievalism, philology, literary history, art history, folklore, performance studies, and reception studies.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/ml_juggler/1007/thumbnail.jp