Jews, Modernity, and the Fiction of Ben-Levi
This article presents the work of Ben-Lévi [pseud. Godchaux Weil, 1806-1878], who published a series of short stories in the Archives Israélites de France, the leading French Jewish newspaper, during the 1840s. One of the first Jews to write fiction in French, Ben-Lévi offers a portrait of a community caught between tradition and progress. Combining the "realist" literary codes of Balzac with the "idealist" codes of Sand, his stories hold up a critical mirror to the assimilating Jewish bourgeoisie of the era and show how a reformed Judaism could help resolve the dilemmas of modernity. Ben-Lévi's forgotten fictions reveal the agency and creativity of nineteenth-century French Jews in the face of momentous social change while also demonstrating the versatility of French literary models. (MS)
SEMITISM AND CRITICISM: VICTORIAN ANGLO-JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY
IN THE JEW IN THE TEXT: Modernity and the Construction of Identity (1995) Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb noted that although questions of race, colonialism, and Eurocentrism were now prominent in cultural studies, the ways in which the “Jew” had been represented in modern culture remained relatively unexplored (6). Over the last few years, however, exploration of this kind has burgeoned, bringing with it important challenges both for Jewish studies and for English literary history. The nineteenth century has proved a particularly rich resource for such research, and the importance of this period for considering the relationship between modernity and the “Jew” is underlined by Nochlin:
Analogy, Supposition, and Transcendentality in Narrative Argument
Rodden writes, “How do stories persuade us? How do they ‘move’—and move us? The short answer: by analogies.” Rodden’s claim is a natural first view, also held by others. This chapter considers the extent to which this view is true and helpful in understanding how fictional narratives, taken as wholes, may be argumentative, comparing it to the two principal (though not necessarily exclusive) alternatives that have been proposed: understanding fictional narratives as exhibiting the structure of suppositional argument, or the structure of a kind of transcendental argument. Three key aspects of understanding a fictional narrative as an argument from analogy are identified. First, the argument will be relativistic or depend in an essential way upon the circumstances or intentions of the auditor or author. Second, in view of the first aspect, the argument will be loose and subjective, and accordingly less likely to yield knowledge. Third, the argument will not exhibit a distinctive structure applicable only to fictional narratives. I find that the third, and sometimes the first and second, of these same three aspects apply to understanding fictional narratives as suppositional arguments. I present considerations that point to a way of establishing that some extended fictions exhibit the structure of a kind of transcendental argument that is neither relativistic nor subjective, is knowledge-generating, and is uniquely applicable to fictional narratives. This supports literary cognitivism—the thesis that “literary fiction can be a source of knowledge in a way that depends crucially on its being fictional.”