Modernism Without Jews?

Scott Spector is Professor of History and Germanic Languages and Literature at the University of Michigan. He is author of Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Siècle.

• Preface: Historicizing German-Jewish Subjectivity1. Forget Assimilation: Subjectivity and German-Jewish History2. Modernism Without Jews: A Counter-Historical Argument3. The Secularization Question: Germans, Jews, and the Historical Understanding of Modernity4. Edith Stein's Passing Gestures: Intimate Histories, Empathic Portraits5. Two Vultures: Freud Between "Jewish Science" and Humanism6. Elsewhere in Austria: Jewish Writing between "Habsburg Myth" and "Central Europe Effect"7. Max Brod's Homelands, Kafka's Patrimony8. Kafka and Literary Modernism9. The Law of the Letter: Kafka's Correspondence with Milena JesenskáIndex

"Highly recommended."—Choice"Spector's book is required reading for all students of modernism and the German-Jewish contribution to this fraught moment in European history."—Reading Religion"The essays in this collection are virtuoso performances demonstrating how Scott Spector's radical textual method could be applied to a range of controversial intellectuals. There is, of course, a vast body of interpretation surrounding these figures, and it is a credit to Spector's erudition, originality and synthetic abilities that he nevertheless has something new to say about them."—Mary Gluck, author of Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris"Scott Spector has been advocating for a subject-based understanding of German-Jewish modernity throughout his distinguished career. This book brings this work together and culminates in a new and compelling approach to this much-studied topic."—Todd Herzog, author of Crime Stories: Criminalistic Fantasy and the Culture of Crisis in Weimar Germany