Conflicting narratives: the otherness within expressionist approaches to the Golem vs Cynthia Ozick's affirmation of the myth's Jewishness
Gustav Meyrink's novel "Der Golem" (1915), which was accompanied by illustrations by Hugo Steiner-Prag, and Paul Wegener's silent expressionist film (1920) garnered so much critical and audience attention for their treatment of the golem that they soon became a paradigm for futur...
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| Format: | book |
| Publication Date: | 2022 |
| Country: | España |
| Institution: | Universidad de Alcalá (UAH) |
| Repository: | e_Buah Biblioteca Digital Universidad de Alcalá |
| Language: | English |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:ebuah.uah.es:10017/61992 |
| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10017/61992 |
| Access Level: | Open access |
| Keyword: | Filología Philology |
| Summary: | Gustav Meyrink's novel "Der Golem" (1915), which was accompanied by illustrations by Hugo Steiner-Prag, and Paul Wegener's silent expressionist film (1920) garnered so much critical and audience attention for their treatment of the golem that they soon became a paradigm for future versions of the legendary Jewish clay man. Cynthia Ozick can be counted among the group of writers that have participated in the recent cultural resurgence of this figure. While it seems unlikely that "Puttermesser and Xanthippe" (1997) is a direct response to early twentieth-century approaches to the golem, it is possible to argue that the golemic creature fashioned by this Jewish-American writer offers a counternarrative to these works, where the golem's clearly demarcated cultural and ethnic origins were subverted. More specifically, her ultimate goal is to restore the myth's Jewishness. The conclusion is that the original myth is selectively transformed in all cases to make it fit a specific historical and sociocultural framework. |
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