Bruno Schulz, the Polish Jewish author of brilliant phantasmagoria, was gunned down by a Nazi officer in the Drohobycz ghetto in 1942. He left behind a small corpus of narrative work, published in English under the titles The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. 1 Another manuscript to which he had devoted several years, The Messiah, remained unfinished. Presumably it perished in the Holocaust, for it has never been recovered. Two recent novels, David Grossman's See Under: Love ('Ayen 'erekh 'ahavah)2 and Cynthia Ozick's ( The Messiah of Stockholm ),3 both turn the influence of Bruno Schulz and an evaluation of the events of his life to explicit thematic focus as they engage, too, in an imaginative reconstruction of the lost work, The Messiah. Though they have written very different books in different languages, Ozick and Grossman both take the same constellation of tensions as the raw material of their texts, and they elaborate on this fundamental similarity of concerns as part of a meditation on the power of the imagination, the possibilities of artistic expression, and Jewish identity in the second generation after the Holocaust.

Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

Reinventing Bruno Schulz: Cynthia Ozick's The Messiah of Stockholm and David Grossman's See Under: Love

This paper investigates the effects of physical objects as support for imagination in the context of enactive storytelling. More specifically, we target nine-year-old children because of their general disengagement from creative activity, a phenomenon known as the Fourth-grade Slump that arises from a demotivational spiral brought on by social awareness. We study how enactment using physical objects may allow the child to better engage in story imagination. Our study compares the richness of the imagination under three main enactment conditions with objects that have varying degrees of fidelity to referent objects: Cultural objects (physical visual resemblance); Physical objects (similar physical affordances); Arbitrary objects (minimal physical and visual affordances). We employ a mixed-methods analysis to gauge the child's level of broader imagination from three data sources: Enactment videos, drawings and interviews with the children. We found that the object types significantly differ in their support of the imagination, with the object of highest specificity being most effective. Our findings can inform the design of embodied creativity-support systems for children.

background

The effects of physicality on the child's imagination

On Octopussies, or the Anatomy of Female Power

In the essay “Traveling Theory” (1982), Edward Said suggests that the first time the understanding of a cultural event or phenomenon is filtered through a theoretical formulation, this formulation’s strength derives directly from the source of a concrete, historical context. Focusing on Georg Lukács’s theory of reification, Said argues that in later formulations of this concept—by Lucien Goldmann and Raymond Williams—the original force, emanating from the social upheavals in early twentieth-century Budapest, had been gradually domesticated, tamed and institutionalized. In a later essay, “Traveling Theory Reconsidered” (1994), Said revises his traveling theory in order to re-emphasize and re-actualize the revolutionary potential in Lukács’s concept, but notably in a “decapitated” way. By now, what Said identifies as the element which gradually domesticates and thus “reifies” the original potential of Lukács’s concept of reification is not so much an effect of its subsequent and geographically dispersed formulations, as much as something already implicit in the original formulation by Lukács himself; namely, what Said formulates as “the reconciliatory and resolvable aspect of his diagnosis,” that is, Lukács’s faith in the critical potential of class consciousness (“Traveling Theory Reconsidered” 438).2 In the revised version of Said’s traveling theory, it is now precisely the ge-

Novelistic Interpretation: The Traveling Theory of Lukács's Theory of the Novel

https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/studies_in_american_fiction/v039/39.2.gram.pdf

Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

Citations

Reinventing Bruno Schulz: Cynthia Ozick's The Messiah of Stockholm and David Grossman's See Under: Love

The effects of physicality on the child's imagination

On Octopussies, or the Anatomy of Female Power

Novelistic Interpretation: The Traveling Theory of Lukács's Theory of the Novel

Chester Himes and the Capacities of State