Review of Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters by Maya Barzilai

The golem crosses many borders. A popular culture icon and an enduring image of creative power, its hybridity contributes to its elusive nature. What it is and what it means shifts over time. Maya Barzilai\u27s Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters takes a unique approach. Deeply interdisciplinary, as one must be to explore such a complex and paradoxical figure, and drawing on religious, literary, cinematic, and historical contexts, Barzilai weaves a rich tapestry of golem narratives. All the while, Barzilai keeps a clear eye on the golem\u27s ongoing association with war, seeing its birth in the clay trenches of World War One and tracing its later evolution as emblematic of nuclear weapons, computer technology, and Israeli military policy

Temma Berg, Professor of English

In this first Next Page column of 2018, Temma Berg, Professor of English, shares which texts have had a lasting influence on her teaching career and scholarship, how a chance meeting created a connection between her and one of her favorite childhood literary characters – Anne of Green Gables, which book she likes to give as a gift to friends who are retiring, and why she might just prefer to open another book rather than host a literary dinner party

Our Monuments, Our History

Beginning with Toni Morrison\u27s concept of rememory and the recent completion of the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers on the University of Virginia campus, this essay explores the current monuments controversy by focusing on four Viennese monuments which have much to tell us about how new memorials might contextualize and reframe history. The first Viennese monument, a celebration of a series of fifteenth-century pogroms, was built into the wall of a house opposite the Judenplatz, a square in the center of what was once a thriving Jewish community. Four hundred years later, from 1998 to 2008, three additional memorials were built to emphasize the horror of the Viennese pogrom and others like it. The article ends with a brief mention of a 1955 rememorial in a cathedral in Lincoln, England to address the wrongs perpetrated in 1255 when Jews were accused of the ritual murder of a Christian boy named Hugh. New monuments talk back to old and bear witness to people’s changing awareness of the significance of past horrors

After the Golem: Teaching Golems, Kabbalah, Exile, Imagination, and Technological Takeover.

The golem is an elusive creature. From a religious perspective it enacts spirit entering matter, a creation story of potential salvation crossed with reprehensible arrogance. As a historical narrative, the golem story becomes a tale of Jewish powerlessness and oppression, of pogroms and ghettoization, of assimilation and exile, and sometimes, of renewal. As the subject of a course in women, gender and sexuality studies, the golem narrative can be seen as a relentless questioning of otherness and identity and as a revelation of the complex intersectionalities of gender, class, sexuality, race, disability, and ethnicity. As a philosophical motif, the ambiguous figure of the golem represents our human fears that we are not the autonomous individuals we believe ourselves to be. Haunted by specters of artificiality and automatism, we wonder whether we are unique individuals or inexorably programmed by social, cultural, psychological, and biological forces we are just beginning to fathom. As a Jewish story, the golem narrative illuminates the relentless history of anti-Semitism and resistance to blood libels of all sorts, hope for the future as well as despair, and most of all, the need for questioning any narrative we are given if we want to uncover its potential significances. [excerpt

Women, Gender, and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain

This edited collection, a tribute to the late noted eighteenth-century scholar Betty Rizzo, testifies to her influence as a researcher, writer, teacher, and mentor. The essays, written by a range of established and younger eighteenth-century specialists, expand on the themes important to Rizzo: the importance of the archive, the contributions of women writers to the canon of eighteenth-century literature and to an emerging print culture, the sometimes fraught relations within the eighteenth-century family, the relationship between life and literature, and, finally, the role of female companionship in women’s lives. Divided into three sections, “Living in the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” “Living in the Eighteenth-Century World,” and “Afterlives,” the fourteen essays that form the body of the collection treat such topics as epistolarity, fraternal relations in novels and in families, women and travel in Jane Austen’s novels, the pleasures and challenges of searching through archives to understand the complex entanglements of eighteenth-century families, the changing reception of Alexander Pope’s poetry, and intersections among race, class, gender, and sexuality in a famous early-nineteenth-century Scottish libel case. The final essay of the fourteen connects the archetypal eighteenth-century figure of the seduced and abandoned woman to Sophie Calle’s 2007 Venice Biennale exhibition entitled Take Care of Yourself, which the author reads as a direct descendant of the eighteenth-century letter novel. The book is framed by an introduction that situates the book as part of the ongoing redefinition of the archive of eighteenth-century literature and an afterword that gives a personal account of Rizzo’s career and her indelible legacy as friend, mentor, and professional model. The contributors use a variety of methods in their scholarship, but a common strand is archival research and close reading inflected by feminist analysis. The contributors to the volume practice the kind of scholarship Rizzo was known for—painstaking archival research and attention to the nuances of relationships among eighteenth-century women (and men)—and in so doing shed new light on a number of familiar and not-so-familiar eighteenth-century texts.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1013/thumbnail.jp

Women, Gender, and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain

This edited collection, a tribute to the late noted eighteenth-century scholar Betty Rizzo, testifies to her influence as a researcher, writer, teacher, and mentor. The essays, written by a range of established and younger eighteenth-century specialists, expand on the themes important to Rizzo: the importance of the archive, the contributions of women writers to the canon of eighteenth-century literature and to an emerging print culture, the sometimes fraught relations within the eighteenth-century family, the relationship between life and literature, and, finally, the role of female companionship in women’s lives. Divided into three sections, “Living in the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” “Living in the Eighteenth-Century World,” and “Afterlives,” the fourteen essays that form the body of the collection treat such topics as epistolarity, fraternal relations in novels and in families, women and travel in Jane Austen’s novels, the pleasures and challenges of searching through archives to understand the complex entanglements of eighteenth-century families, the changing reception of Alexander Pope’s poetry, and intersections among race, class, gender, and sexuality in a famous early-nineteenth-century Scottish libel case. The final essay of the fourteen connects the archetypal eighteenth-century figure of the seduced and abandoned woman to Sophie Calle’s 2007 Venice Biennale exhibition entitled Take Care of Yourself, which the author reads as a direct descendant of the eighteenth-century letter novel. The book is framed by an introduction that situates the book as part of the ongoing redefinition of the archive of eighteenth-century literature and an afterword that gives a personal account of Rizzo’s career and her indelible legacy as friend, mentor, and professional model. The contributors use a variety of methods in their scholarship, but a common strand is archival research and close reading inflected by feminist analysis. The contributors to the volume practice the kind of scholarship Rizzo was known for—painstaking archival research and attention to the nuances of relationships among eighteenth-century women (and men)—and in so doing shed new light on a number of familiar and not-so-familiar eighteenth-century texts.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1013/thumbnail.jp

The Business of Coquetting

The eighteenth century deplored the coquette. Mary Wollstonecraft, a stern critic of flirting, argued that getting a husband should not be the business of a woman’s life. In their evening meetings, it is likely that the Brontë sisters read and discussed Wollstonecraft. Certainly, her ideas can be found in their novels. Sometimes they agreed with their forerunner, sometimes they challenged her. In my essay I look at a few moments in Charlotte Brontë’s writings where she considers the guilty pleasures of coquetting. I begin with Jane and Rochester and end with a glimpse at Charlotte’s fascination with William Weightman. Did the flirting of this otherwise admirable cleric serve as the contradiction that enabled her to value coquetting? In her letters and presumably also in her life and certainly in her novels, Charlotte coquettes. A process of revealing and concealing, of opening and closing off possibilities, of piquing interest and toying with expectations, writing a novel is, after all, not unlike coquetting. It could be argued that for Charlotte Brontë not only was literature a woman’s (and a man’s) business but so was coquetting

Thomas Rowlandson’s Vauxhall Gardens: The Lives of a Print

While there have been many reception studies of verbal texts, it is only recently that we have begun to explore the historical and cultural contexts of interpretations of eighteenth-century visual print culture. Given that Thomas Rowlandson’s 1784 watercolor Vauxhall Gardens has become the definitive image of that famous pleasure garden, and has given rise to many complex and contradictory readings, a reception history of this beguiling print is long overdue. Tracing the print’s reception from Henry Angelo, an old, school friend of Rowlandson’s, through David Coke and Alan Borg’s 2011 sumptuous cultural history of the gardens, this article concludes with a closer look at a version of the print that has only recently come to light. Part of the Paul Mellon Collection housed at the Yale Center for British Art, this image, perhaps a trial version, contains a surprising figure that is absent from the more familiar watercolor. At center left, just behind the figures that have often been identified as the Duchess of Devonshire and Lady Duncannon, stands a man who appears to be holding a drawing pad with which to capture the likeness of the viewer who stands before him, or, better yet, the likeness of the artist who faces the crowd and sketches the scene captured in Vauxhall Gardens, in other words, Rowlandson himself. An endless of hall of mirrors in which we can gaze at ourselves gazing at others gazing at us, Rowlandson’s Vauxhall Gardens is indeed a print with many lives

The Brontës in Turkey

The Brontës never went to Turkey — but an important conference entitled “The Brontë Sisters and their Work” was held in Ankara in December 2013. Spurred on by the hospitality and intellectual excitement of the event and by the way other sites in Turkey reflected back on the three sisters and their work, I wrote a personal essay about the experience