Embodied Differences: The Jew's Body and Materiality in Russian Literature and Culture

by Henrietta Mondry

Overview

This book analyzes the ways in which literary works and cultural discourses employ the construct of the Jew’s body in relation to the material world in order either to establish and reinforce, or to subvert and challenge, dominant cultural norms and stereotypes. It examines the use of physical characteristics, embodied practices, tacit knowledge and senses to define the body taxonomically as normative, different, abject or mimetically desired. Starting from the works of Gogol and Dostoevsky through to contemporary Russian-Jewish women’s writing, broadening the scope to examining the role of objects, museum displays and the politics of heritage food, the book argues that materiality can embody fictional constructions that should be approached on a culture-specific basis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644694855
Publisher:	Academic Studies Press
Publication date:	01/12/2021
Pages:	268
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

Henrietta Mondry is Professor in the Department of Global, Cultural and Language Studies at the University of Canterbury. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and has published widely on cultural history and literature. Her books include Populist Writers and the Jews and Exemplary Bodies: Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture.

Table of Contents

A note on transliteration
List of illustrations

Introduction

Part One: The Other Body and Spaces for Matter

Chapter One. Locating historically the Jew’s body between display and transformation
Chapter Two. The power of meat: defining ethnicity and masculinity in Gogol
Chapter Three. Valued bodies and spaces: cross-religious encounters in Dostoevsky
Chapter Four. Intimate spaces: the modern Jewess in the boudoir in Chekhov and Bely
Chapter Five. Animal advocacy and ritual murder trials
Chapter Six. Aphids and other undesirables: the predatory Jew versus Soviet art
Chapter Seven. Abject bodies: tactility, dissection, and body rites in postmodernist fiction

Part Two: Re/active Embodiments and a Sense of Things

Chapter Eight. Women writers inventing exotic origins
Chapter Nine. Strange ancestors in the house and in the basement
Chapter Ten. On feeding the family: constructing Jewishness through nurture
Chapter Eleven. Materiality of smell and constructs of embodied memory
Chapter Twelve. “An edible chronotope”: in search of Jewish heritage food

Conclusion: The Power of Bodies and Senses that Matter

Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“The topic of Henrietta Mondry’s publication can give pleasure to those scholars in Slavic Studies who are interested in how themes of Jewish corporeality are ingrained in Russian societal politics and cultural discourses. … Embodied Differences continues Mondry’s series of original and groundbreaking research published in books and articles centered on the notion of the Jewish Other in Russian literature and culture, where she treats the interconnected topics as the manifestation of the Jew’s essentialized alterity that has been employed to discriminate, entitle, and negotiate the everyday. …[T]his volume is slim, lucidly written, and has plenty to offer… Mondry’s argument is driven with interdisciplinary vigor to bring scientific and philosophic writing … to support her conclusions and present a nuanced picture in which she treats a Jewish physical ‘type’ as a construct whose elements were utilized in Russian literary and cultural imagination. … Embodied Differences exemplifies best practices of scholarly questioning of broad generalizations in a scrupulous, innovative, and highly individualized fashion.”

— Elena Katz, University of Helsinki, Slavic Review

“Henrietta Mondry shows in her new book that the opposition of Jewish to Russian materiality structures literary texts, visual representations, and perceptions of culinary heritage… Mondry persuasively argues for the persistence and significance of the patterns she identifies… [H]er claims are convincing, and she provides a fearless tour through the contradictory landscape of Russian discourse about Jews, its appetizing and unappetizing parts alike.”

— Gabriella Safran, Stanford University, The Russian Review (October 2021)

“This book undoubtedly expands and deepens our knowledge of both the conceptual and the strictly artistic-aesthetic depiction of the Jewish body in Russian literature (especially from the point of view of 'the existence of an object in an alien cultural space'). This is visible in the author’s skillful and subtle interpretations, which are rooted, on the one hand, in a thorough grasp of the material being studied, and, on the other hand, in a pervasive scholarly scrupulousness and a degree of innovative boldness.”

—Vladimir Khazan, Department of Russian, German and Eastern European Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Editorial Reviews

It is noteworthy and commendable that the book, which started with the outsiders’ often pernicious take on the Jew’s body and the “paradoxical space” (212) it occupies in Russian literature, ends with the celebration of Jewish agency. This is one of the many reasons why no student of Russian and Jewish literature and culture should bypass this innovative and provocative book.”

— Marat Grinberg, Antisemitism Studies

“This book rewards the reader as a result of the breadth of discussion of a specific domain, and the number of vectors that Mondry succeeds in applying in her research. This is complemented by the depth of discussion, represented by a layered approach that employs tools from literary theory, psychoanalysis, museum studies, pathology, and sociology, to name a few of the disciplines brought to bear on the topic at hand. It is an extremely erudite study that, nonetheless, engages the reader by its approach, making it an ideal acquisition for any academic library.”

— John Cook, University of Melbourne, Australian Slavonic and East European Studies

From the Publisher