Search results for ""Author Susanne Zepp""

Using five basic texts written in early modern Europe between 1499 and 1627, Susanne Zepp examines the role of Jewish culture in the process of the development of modernity in Romanticism: "La Celestina", the "Dialoghi d'amore" by Leone Ebreo, the first picaresque novel in world literature "Lazarillo de Tormes", the "Essais" by Michel de Montaigne and João Pinto Delgado's poetic adaptations of the Bible. It presents the change in genres and the literary evidence of that time against the background of the history of the 16th century and shows how the emergence of early modern subject consciousness can also be explained from a literary perspective as a universalization of originally particular Jewish experiences.

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What role has Jewish intellectual culture played in the development of modern Romance literature? Susanne Zepp seeks to answer this question through an examination of five influential early modern texts written between 1499 and 1627: Fernando de Rojas's La Celestina, Leone Ebreo's Dialoghi d'amore, the anonymous tale Lazarillo de Tormes (the first picaresque novel), Montaigne's Essais, and the poetical renditions of the Bible by João Pinto Delgado. Forced to straddle two cultures and religions, these Iberian conversos (Jews who converted to Catholicism) prefigured the subjectivity which would come to characterize modernity. As "New Christians" in an intolerant world, these thinkers worked within the tensions of their historical context to question norms and dogmas. In the past, scholars have focused on the Jewish origins of such major figures in literature and philosophy. Through close readings of these texts, Zepp moves the debate away from the narrow question of the authors' origins to focus on the innovative ways these authors subverted and transcended traditional genres. She interprets the changes that took place in various literary genres and works of the period within the broader historical context of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, demonstrating the extent to which the development of early modern subjective consciousness and its expression in literary works can be explained in part as a universalization of originally Jewish experiences.

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The rise of literary history is closely associated with the rise of the modern national states, an "imaginary" parallel that catastrophically peaked in the 20th century and today leads a rather pale existence. The literary history of Jewish literature is a special case that demands attention be given to the various linguistic and symbolic peculiarities as well as its own ideas of space and time due to the transnational, diasporic environment(s).In this volume, Susanne Zepp and Natasha Gordinsky interpret texts from modern literature, among others, by Yoel Hoffmann and Ljudmila Ulitzkaja, which reflect the complexity of Jewish life. They view literature not as a canon, but rather as discourse, and thus as a medium that penetrates national, religious and cultural borders.

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