Brian Swann

Bio: Brian Swann is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Absurdism & Realism. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 4 citations.

George Eliot's Ecumenical Jew, or, The Novel as Outdoor Temple

Abstract: Henry James asked rhetorically of Middlemarch: "If we write novels so, how shall we write History?"1 In her last novel, George Eliot took the historical model of Middlemarch one step further into the vatic or prophetic. Middlemarch had reached beyond "realism" into a highly articulated symbolic structure of what U. C. Knoepflmacher terms a "new reality" "fusing fact and myth."2 In Daniel Deronda George Eliot extended the meaning of myth into "Utopian pictures." In a sense, attempting to summarize the history of the Western world and adumbrate its future, showing how "processes . . . have been repeated again and again," she had reverted to the rather abstract formulation of her first novel, Scenes of Clerical Life.3 Deronda, to be sure, is no Amos Barton or Mr. Gilfil, but, as each of these characters had been created from a dogmatic standpoint, so also Deronda (as critics never tire of telling us) is as much a mouthpiece as dramatic character. James again observed acutely that George Eliot proceeds "from the abstract to the concrete," 4 and most critics agree that Deronda is inconcrete to the point of vapidity. Few of these critics have come up with suggestions as to why Eliot created Deronda the way she did.5 I would like to make a few tentative suggestions, and I'd like to begin with the idea that in Daniel Deronda Eliot's emotional life comes full circle. Its Evangelical origins are transformed into an attempted affirmative consummation of all her aspirations and hopes for mankind. In Daniel Deronda she tried to pull together the parts of a world that had been shattered when she lost her faith in transcendentalism, a loss that forced the burden of meaning on the individual mundane consciousness. George Eliot had never really reconciled herself to that loss, any more than she had reconciled herself to her original sin of disobeying her father and alienating her brother. Kierkegaard's roughly contemporary solution to the same problem of alienation was to elevate the absurd and the paradox against despair. Feuerbach's new form of secular religion, however, was more congenial to George Eliot's conservative-reforming intellect. And yet Kierkegaard can help us understand Deronda. In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard says that "the ethical as such is

Emma Lazarus, Jewish American Poetics, and the Challenge of Modernity

Abstract: Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) was a poet who struggled to translate the Jewish experience into the American idiom for the sake of masses of immigrants seeking to negotiate their pas sage at the border crossing of American culture. Reading her today can teach us a great deal about the degree of imagination required in the journey from the humiliation of dispersion to the joys of Jewish and American nationalisms. I see Lazarus as the harbinger of the modern American ethnic Jew (and perhaps in some ways American ethnic writing as a corpus), one possessed simultaneously of an insider and an outsider sensibility. But "translation" of iden tity, like that of a text, always entails losses as well as gains, and in claiming one Jewish history she remained a stranger to other ways of seeing the past. This essay examines the contradictions between modern identity and ancient lineage that animate Lazarus's late body of proto-Zion ist poetry and polemics. There was a dynamic period when it seemed that Emma Lazarus might become more than a marginal figure in America's Protestant literary culture. By the late 1870s and 1880s, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and many others had all

Emma Lazarus, Jewish American Poetics, and the Challenge of modernity.(Critical Essay)

Abstract: Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) was a poet who struggled to translate the Jewish experience into the American idiom for the sake of masses of immigrants seeking to negotiate their passage at the border crossing of American culture. Reading her today can teach us a great deal about the degree of imagination required in the journey from the humiliation of dispersion to the joys of Jewish and American nationalisms. I see Lazarus as the harbinger of the modern American ethnic Jew (and perhaps in some ways American ethnic writing as a corpus), one possessed simultaneously of an insider and an outsider sensibility. But "translation" of identity, like that of a text, always entails losses as well as gains, and in claiming one Jewish history she remained a stranger to other ways of seeing the past. This essay examines the contradictions between modern identity and ancient lineage that animate Lazarus's late body of proto-Zionist poetry and polemics. There was a dynamic period when it seemed that Emma Lazarus might become more than a marginal figure in America's Protestant literary culture. By the late 1870s and 1880s, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and many others had all praised her translations of Heine as well as her own verse that appeared in Lippincott's and Century. But Lazarus was fated to be memorialized exclusively for "The New Colossus," her great paean to American largesse, and by Jewish Americans for the few years of poetry, essays, and political activity dedicated to their cause. Representative of this trend, the Jewish scholar and activist Henrietta Szold would celebrate Lazarus as "the most distinguished literary figure produced by American Jewry and possibly the most eminent poet among Jews since Heine and Judah Loeb Gordon" (qtd. in Vogel 24). And in the mid-twentieth century, a highly regarded Jewish scholar, Solomon Liptzin, remarked that in the crucial years of the late nineteenth century only a single Jewish writer, the Sephardic poetess Emma Lazarus, succeeded in groping her way during solitary and tragic years from early ignorance and indifference to profound insight and prophetic vision. Phoenix-like, the tired heiress of Colonial Jewry arose resplendent in fresh vigor and heralded a heroic resurgence of her ancient people. (113) Lazarus is increasingly celebrated as the first Jewish American poet to produce poems of significant imagination and lyrical force. Nevertheless, until recently her achievements were largely forgotten; among late-twentieth-century scholars, Lazarus's role in Jewish American history still remains uncertain. Though she is often ignored in major studies of Zionism, I would contend that to fully understand the unusual literary and polemical pedigree of American Zionism, one must begin with Lazarus's assimilationist strategies. (1) By far the most influential Jewish American literary figure of the nineteenth century, Lazarus's reflections on the status of the Jew in Gentile society and on the question of the Jews' return to Palestine offer rich literary and historical contexts for examining later imaginative responses to the perpetually conflicted nature of Zionism in America. Feminist critics such as Wendy Zierler, Diane Lichtenstein, and Carole S. Kessner have persuasively claimed Lazarus as a founding Mother of Jewish American literature, unfairly neglected by shapers of the American literary canon because of gender and religion. (2) This essay investigates a dimension of the poet's work that is still neglected, namely her timely appropriations of Protestant conventions relating to the Hebrews and the Holy Land. Anticipating Horace Kallen in a later generation, Lazarus saw ethnicity, not religion, as the key to Jewish survival. Perhaps this was the way to translate the unchanging Jew into terms that would be the most palatable in the American milieu. For Lazarus, Jewish ethnicity, if it was to have any tangible substance, would necessarily be linked to a concrete discourse of origins and homelands. …

Imagining the National Present

Abstract: This poignant rejection of metaphysics should stand as the epigraph to the English aspect of Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. For, by the time of her last novel, George Eliot was showing distinct signs of just such a scepticism towards grand, all-encompassing philosophies. Moreover, whereas such philosophizing was problematized in the earlier fictions through an oscillation between perceptions of coherence and incoherence, at this later stage fracture and fragmentation was predominant. The problematization of history in Daniel Deronda is thus far more acute. Hence the predominance of Chance as the dynamic of the historical process in the English aspect of the novel, a dynamic that tends towards a rejection of the narrative perception of history partially sustained in earlier work. Chance stands both as a method of representing the moral bankruptcy at the core of English society, with characters relying on Chance and not actively engaging with history in order to shape their own destinies, and also as the chief signifier of the absence of a coherent historical process. History unfolds, it would appear, without meaning or particular direction; at least if there is an inherent direction, then it is beyond human perception.