Homer, Humanism, Holocaust

Homer, Humanism, Holocaust
Author: Adam J. Goldwyn
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2022-10-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 3031114736

This book examines how Jewish intellectuals during and after the Second World War reinterpreted Homer’s epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, in light of their own wartime experiences, drawing a parallel between the ancient Greek genocide of the Trojans and the Nazi genocide of the Jews. The wartime writings of Theodore Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Erich Auerbach, Rachel Bespaloff, Hermann Broch, Max Horkheimer, Primo Levi, and others were attempts both to understand the collapse of European civilization and the Enlightenment through critiques of their foundational texts and to imagine the place of the Homeric epics in a new post-War humanism. The book thus also explores the reception of these writers, analyzing how Jewish child-survivors like Geoffrey Hartman and Hélène Cixous and writers of the post-Holocaust generation like Daniel Mendelsohn continued to read the epics as narratives of grief, trauma, and woundedness into the twenty-first century. .

Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Derrida on Deconstruction

Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Derrida on Deconstruction
Author: Barry Stocker
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2006-04-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134343817

Examining one of the most important and prolific figures in modern thought, Barry Stocker offers a lucid introduction to key texts including Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference.

The Devil and Secular Humanism

The Devil and Secular Humanism
Author: Howard Radest
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 184
Release: 1990-11-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0313388547

There is currently much confusion about the nature of humanism and a good deal of interest in its point of view. As the object of attack and suspicion by fundamentalists, conservatives, and traditional religionists, Howard B. Radest believes that humanism deserves a clear and responsible treatment. He accomplishes this in this book by clarifying the nature of humanism in historical and current thought. The Enlightenment, Radest states, gave birth to a number of humanist values that are still being worked out in today's societies. He reconstructs how humanist values have been considered dangerous by those who fear a change in the status quo. Humanism, Radest maintains, is the true descendant of the age of reason and freedom. In this unique volume, humanism is viewed as being misunderstood by both traditionalists and the humanists themselves. Radest does not wish to disparage traditional beliefs, but he emphasizes that humanism is a legitimate philosophical, ideological, and religious alternative--a party to the current struggle for a postmodern life philosophy. The Devil and Secular Humanism examines humanism in a more comprehensive way than most current literature, and it includes an assessment of the prospects for humanism in the years ahead. It will be of great use to a literate, but nontechnical, audience who are engaged in philosophy, religion, law, and politics.

Greeks, Romans, Germans

Greeks, Romans, Germans
Author: Johann Chapoutot
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2016-09-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520292979

Much has been written about the conditions that made possible Hitler's rise and the Nazi takeover of Germany, but when we tell the story of the National Socialist Party, should we not also speak of Julius Caesar and Pericles? Greeks, Romans, Germans argues that to fully understand the racist, violent end of the Nazi regime, we must examine its appropriation of the heroes and lessons of the ancient world. When Hitler told the assembled masses that they were a people with no past, he meant that they had no past following their humiliation in World War I of which to be proud. The Nazis' constant use of classical antiquity—in official speeches, film, state architecture, the press, and state-sponsored festivities—conferred on them the prestige and heritage of Greece and Rome that the modern German people so desperately needed. At the same time, the lessons of antiquity served as a warning: Greece and Rome fell because they were incapable of protecting the purity of their blood against mixing and infiltration. To regain their rightful place in the world, the Nazis had to make all-out war on Germany's enemies, within and without.

The Return of Christian Humanism

The Return of Christian Humanism
Author: Lee Oser
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0826217753

"Oser examines the twentieth-century literary clash between a dogmatically relativist modernism and a robust revival of Christian humanism. Reviewing English literature from Chaucer to Beckett, and the thoughts of philosophers, theologians, and modern literary critics, Oser challenges the assumption that Christian orthodoxy is incompatible with humanism, freedom, and democracy"--Provided by publisher.

The Victory of Humanism

The Victory of Humanism
Author: Thomas Martin
Publisher: Backintyme
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 0939479362

Martin connects what Erik Rush calls "negrophilia" to an inversion of aesthetic sensibility that transformed Western culture over the past two centuries. His connecting of trends in fine painting, sculpture, literature, music, opera, drama, religion, even cinema, to U.S. race relations is spellbinding. 188 pp.

Re-Figuring Hayden White

Re-Figuring Hayden White
Author: Frank Ankersmit
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2009-06-24
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0804776253

Produced in honor of White's eightieth birthday, Re-Figuring Hayden White testifies to the lasting importance of White's innovative work, which firmly reintegrates historical studies with literature and the humanities. The book is a major reconsideration of the historian's contributions and influence by an international group of leading scholars from a variety of disciplines. Individual essays address the key concepts of White's intellectual career, including tropes, narrative, figuralism, and the historical sublime while exploring the place of White's work in the philosophy of history, postmodernism, and ethics. They also discuss his role as historian and teacher and apply his ideas to specific historical events.

Renaissance Posthumanism

Renaissance Posthumanism
Author: Joseph Campana
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2016-03-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0823269574

Connecting Renaissance humanism to the variety of “critical posthumanisms” in twenty-first-century literary and cultural theory, Renaissance Posthumanism reconsiders traditional languages of humanism and the human, not by nostalgically enshrining or triumphantly superseding humanisms past but rather by revisiting and interrogating them. What if today’s “critical posthumanisms,” even as they distance themselves from the iconic representations of the Renaissance, are in fact moving ever closer to ideas in works from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century? What if “the human” is at once embedded and embodied in, evolving with, and de-centered amid a weird tangle of animals, environments, and vital materiality? Seeking those patterns of thought and practice, contributors to this collection focus on moments wherein Renaissance humanism looks retrospectively like an uncanny “contemporary”—and ally—of twenty-first-century critical posthumanism.

Primo Levi and Humanism after Auschwitz

Primo Levi and Humanism after Auschwitz
Author: J. Druker
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2009-06-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230622186

This innovative study reassesses Primo Levi's Holocaust memoirs in light of the posthumanist theories of Adorno, Levinas, Lyotard, and Foucault and finds causal links between certain Enlightenment ideas and the Nazi genocide.

Humanism and the Death of God

Humanism and the Death of God
Author: Ronald E. Osborn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2017-01-19
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0192510991

Humanism and the Death of God is a critical exploration of secular humanism and its discontents. Through close readings of three exemplary nineteenth-century philosophical naturalists or materialists, who perhaps more than anyone set the stage for our contemporary quandaries when it comes to questions of human nature and moral obligation, Ronald E. Osborn argues that "the death of God" ultimately tends toward the death of liberal understandings of the human as well. Any fully persuasive defense of humanistic values--including the core humanistic concepts of inviolable dignity, rights, and equality attaching to each individual--requires an essentially religious vision of personhood. Osborn shows such a vision is found in an especially dramatic and historically consequential way in the scandalous particularity of the Christian narrative of God becoming a human. He does not attempt to provide logical proofs for the central claims of Christian humanism along the lines some philosophers might demand. Instead, this study demonstrates how philosophical naturalism or materialism, and secular humanisms and anti-humanisms, might be persuasively read from the perspective of a classically orthodox Christian faith.