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Bookshelf | English Department
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Bookshelf

2023

	Leon Modena's Kinah shemor
Lazarus, Micah . Leon Modena'S Kinah Shemor . Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2023. Print.

	The Bible in American Poetic Culture: Community, Conflict, War
Wolosky, Shira . The Bible In American Poetic Culture: Community, Conflict, War . Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. Print.

	The Sacred Power of Language in Modern Jewish Thought: Levinas, Derrida, Scholem
Wolosky, Shira . The Sacred Power Of Language In Modern Jewish Thought: Levinas, Derrida, Scholem . De Gruyter, 2023. Print.
2021
Hazarding All: Shakespeare and the Drama of Consciousness
Budick, Sanford . Hazarding All: Shakespeare And The Drama Of Consciousness. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. Print.Abstract
Hazarding All: Shakespeare and the Drama of Consciousness demonstrates how counter-forces within theatricalization create the conditions for an unmediated encounter with actuality. In the pairs of plays examined here, the playwright and the spectator attain to an onlooker consciousness that exits the fictionality, the play-acting, of theatre itself.
2020
Flann O'Brien: Gallows Humour
Borg, Ruben, and Paul Fagan, eds. Flann O'Brien: Gallows Humour. Cork: Cork University Press, 2020. Print.
Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism
Levin, Yael . Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Print.
2019
Just Literature: Philosophical Criticism and Justice
Zamir, Tzachi . Just Literature: Philosophical Criticism And Justice. New York: Routledge, 2019. Print.
Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontexual Reading
Toker, Leona . Gulag Literature And The Literature Of Nazi Camps: An Intercontexual Reading. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. Print.Abstract
Devoted to the ways in which Holocaust literature and gulag literature provide contexts for each other, Leona Toker's Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps shows how the prominent features of one shed light on the veiled features and methods of the other. Toker views these narratives and texts against the background of historical information about the Soviet and the Nazi regimes of repression. Writers at the center of this work include Varlam Shalamov, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Ka-Tzetnik, and others including Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniya Ginzburg, and Jorge Semprun illuminate the discussion. Toker’s twofold analysis concentrates on the narrative qualities of the works as well as how each text documents the writer’s experience. She provides insight into how fictionalized narrative can double as historical testimony, how references to events might have become obscure owing to the passage of time and the cultural diversity of readers, and how these references form new meaning in the text. Toker is well-known as a skillful interpreter of gulag literature, and this text presents new thinking about how gulag literature and Holocaust literature enable a better understanding about testimony in the face of evil. 
Fantasies of Self-Mourning: Modernism, the Posthuman and the Finite
Borg, Ruben . Fantasies Of Self-Mourning: Modernism, The Posthuman And The Finite. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019. Print.Abstract
In Fantasies of Self-Mourning Ruben Borg describes the formal features of a posthuman, cyborgian imaginary at work in modernism. The book’s central claim is that modernism invents the posthuman as a way to think through the contradictions of its historical moment. Borg develops a posthumanist critique of the concept of organic life based on comparative readings of Pirandello, Woolf, Beckett, and Flann O’Brien, alongside discussions of Alfred Hitchcock, Chris Marker, Béla Tarr, Ridley Scott and Mamoru Oshii. The argument draws together a cluster of modernist narratives that contemplate the separation of a cybernetic eye from a human body—or call for a tearing up of the body understood as a discrete organic unit capable of synthesizing desire and sense perception.
2018
Shakespeare's Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives
Zamir, Tzachi . Shakespeare'S Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Print.Abstract
Does philosophy gain or lose when it is embedded within literature or embodied by drama? Does literary criticism gain or lose when it turns to literary works as occasions for abstract reflection? Leading literary scholars and philosophers interrogate philosophical dimensions of Shakespeare's Hamlet with these urgent questions in view.
Scholars probe Hamlet's own insights, assess the significance of philosophy's literary-dramatic framing by this play, and trace the philosophically-relevant underpinnings revealed by historical transformations in Hamlet's reception. They focus on the play's thematizations of subjectivity, knowledge, sex, grief, self-theatricalization.
Examining Shakespeare's play from a philosophical standpoint sharpens the questions the play itself so famously poses: What counts as a proper response to injustice upon realizing that whatever one does, there can be no undoing of the initial wrong? What do our commitments to the dead amount to? How to persist in infusing significance into action while grasping the degradation of death and our own replaceability? Scholars at the forefront of their fields tackle these and other questions from a wide range of viewpoints, illuminating the central concerns of one of Shakespeare's masterpieces.
Thomas Hardy's Elegiac Prose and Poetry: Codes of Bereavement
Benziman, Galia . Thomas Hardy'S Elegiac Prose And Poetry: Codes Of Bereavement. London: Palgrave, 2018. Print.Abstract
This book examines the transition from traditional to modern elegy through a close study of Thomas Hardy’s oeuvre and its commitment to mourning and remembrance. Hardy is usually read as an avowed elegist who writes against the collective forgetfulness typical of the late-Victorian era. But Hardy, as argued here, is dialectically implicated in the very cultural and psychological amnesia that he resists, as her book demonstrates by expanding the corpus of study beyond the spousal elegies (the “Poems of 1912-1913”) to include a wide variety of poems, novels and short stories that deal with bereavement and mourning. Locating the modern aspect of Hardy’s elegiac writing in this ambivalence and in the subversion of memory as unreliable, the book explores the textual moments at which Hardy challenges binary dichotomies such as forgetting vs. remembering, narcissism vs. unselfish commitment, grief vs. betrayal, the work of mourning vs. melancholia, presence vs. absence. The book's analysis allows us to relate Hardy’s elegiac poetics, and particularly his description of the mourner as a writer, to shifting late-Victorian conceptualizations of death, memory, art, science and gender relations.
2017
Ascent: Philosophy and Paradise Lost
Zamir, Tzachi . Ascent: Philosophy And Paradise Lost. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Print.
Flann O'Brien: Problems with Authority
Borg, Ruben, Paul Fagan John McCourt (Eds.) . Flann O'Brien: Problems With Authority. Cork: Cork University Press, 2017. Print.
2015
V.S. Naipaul: Displacement and Autobiography
Levy, Judith . V.s. Naipaul: Displacement And Autobiography. London: Routledge, 2015. Print.
Romance and History
Whitman, Jon (ed.) . Romance And History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Print.
The Subject of Holocaust Fiction
Budick, Emily M. . The Subject Of Holocaust Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. Print.
2014
Acts: Theater, Philosophy and the Performing Self
Zamir, Tzachi . Acts: Theater, Philosophy And The Performing Self. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. Print.Abstract

Why do people act? Why are other people drawn to watch them? How is acting as a performing art related to role-playing outside the theater? As the first philosophical study devoted to acting, Acts: Theater, Philosophy, and the Performing Self sheds light on some of the more evasive aspects of the acting experience— such as the import of the actor's voice, the ethical unease sometimes felt while embodying particular sequences, and the meaning of inspiration. Tzachi Zamir explores acting’s relationship to everyday role-playing through a surprising range of examples of “lived acting,” including pornography, masochism, and eating disorders. By unearthing the deeper mobilizing structures that underlie dissimilar forms of staged and non-staged role-playing, Acts offers a multi-layered meditation on the percolation from acting to life.

Flann O'Brien: Contesting Legacies
Borg, Ruben, Paul Fagan, and Werner Huber (Eds.). Flann O'Brien: Contesting Legacies. Cork: Cork University Press, 2014. Print.
2013
Feminist Theory Across Disciplines
Wolosky, Shira . Feminist Theory Across Disciplines. London: Routledge, 2013. Print.
2012
Knowledge and Pain
Toker, Leona, and Esther Cohen, eds. Knowledge And Pain. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. Print.