Lecture: "The People of the Book. The Politics of Writing in Jewish Modernity"

Andreas Kilcher, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies, ETH Zurich

Thursday, November 10, 2011, 5:00 p.m.

The topos of the "people of the book," a term originally used by non-Jews to refer to Jews since the time of the Koran, was taken over and interpreted in different ways in German-Jewish modernity, from the writings of Heinrich Heine through post-holocaust literature. The term may seem to designate a pre-modern pattern of Jewish religious life. However it turns out to be an excellent phrase for reflecting on the politics of writing, or to be more precise, for negotiating the elementary relationship between literature and the idea of nationalism in Jewish modernity. While a liberal and "diasporic" reading understood the idiom of the "people of the book" as a paradigm of Jewish cosmopolitanism, Zionist intellectuals around 1900 tried to rethink the phrase in terms of nationalism.

Andreas Kilcher has been Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at the ETH Zurich since June 2008. He is the author of several books, including:  Franz Kafka.  Life.  Work.  Influence (2008); Shared Joy: Schiller’s Reception in Jewish Modernity (2007); Mathesis and Poesis: The Encyclopaedic Literature of 1600 to 2000 (2003); The Language Theory of the Kabbalah as Aesthetic Paradigm, (1998). He is also the editor of several works, including the Metzler Lexicon of German-Jewish literature (2000).  Professor Kilcher's research interests include: German-Jewish literature and culture; theory and poetology of knowledge; studies in esotericism.  (See Professor Kilcher’s Homepage: http://www.lit.ethz.ch/)

Sponsored by the Kutchin Seminar Series in Jewish Studies and the Department of Germanic Languages&  Literatures, in commemoration of Kristallnacht.