David Suchoff | Colby College (original) (raw)
Books by David Suchoff
"Kafka's Jewish Languages The Hidden Openness of Tradition David Suchoff 304 pages | 6 x 9 ... more "Kafka's Jewish Languages
The Hidden Openness of Tradition
David Suchoff
304 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth Dec 2011 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4371-0 | $65.00s | £42.50 |
"In Kafka's Jewish Languages David Suchoff quite persuasively argues that the Germanic interplay between high and low (Yiddish) languages and the rise of modern Hebrew account for far more of the plays and innovations of Kafka's writing than has previously been acknowledged. Suchoff's diligent, innovative, and supremely intelligent work adds significantly to Kafka scholarship and Judaic studies."—Henry Sussman, Yale University"
Using the methods of Frankfurt School theorists, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, Suchoff offe... more Using the methods of Frankfurt School theorists, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, Suchoff offers new readings of Dickens, Melville and Kafka that underscore the political and social critiques inherent in their novels. He also studies the historical origins of literary theory.
Papers by David Suchoff
Canonization and Alterity
Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy, 2007
Kafka and the Universal, ed. Arthur Cools and Vivian Liska, 2012
On the satire of the universal as Kafka's means of expressing the plurality of Jewish and other c... more On the satire of the universal as Kafka's means of expressing the plurality of Jewish and other cultures type-cast as particular, or minor traditions. A comparison with Samuel Beckett's use of French to explode the colonizing box of English is drawn, with references to the redemptive humor from which both writers drew.
Traces de vie à Auschwitz: un manuscrit clandestin, 2022
A commentary on an Introduction, written in Yiddish, to a secret anthology of Yiddish writing as... more A commentary on an Introduction, written in Yiddish, to a secret anthology of Yiddish writing assembled in Auschwitz on January 3 1945.
If the earlier generations were like angels, we are like men; if they are like men, we are like d... more If the earlier generations were like angels, we are like men; if they are like men, we are like donkeys.
The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 2018
This essay considers Beckett's linguistics as a redemption of otherness, suggesting new sourc... more This essay considers Beckett's linguistics as a redemption of otherness, suggesting new sources for his well-known motif of digestion and expulsion from the German tradition. Watt as well as his postwar French are shown to signal a swallowing of Goethe on Beckett's part, and his notion of “das Fremde” as digested foreign origins. Beckett's poetics of ingestion are read in the context of his “Gnome,” a foreign voice both native to national literatures, and which seeks to escape its traditionally diminished and comically distorted form. Beckett's excretion of his origins is central to the motifs of re-digestion, expulsion, and recovery that identify his linguistics of canonical creation. This hidden Germanic tradition of theft, distortion, and expulsion of foreign treasures—the “Schatz” of “Indianer-Joe,” in Adorno's phrase—is in turn read as enabling Beckett's project of redeeming the displaced sources of his own canonical literary voice.
This essay explores the ways Kafka's transnational perspective works underground in Beckett's tex... more This essay explores the ways Kafka's transnational perspective works underground in Beckett's texts and mediates his move to French. The banning of Kafka's books in Germany, where Beckett spent parts of 1936–37, and Molloy (born “from my mother's arse”) are seen as Beckett's creative identification with the expelled. Moran's inability to digest the “Lager” in Molloy, and the visit of “Gaber”—anagrams “Rabe,” the Kafka/crow that escapes the “Grabe” or grave of banished but lively literary influences in this post–World War II process. Beckett's comment that Kafka's “form was not shaken by the experience it conveys” (1962) re-articulates such ingestion as part of the process of canonical creation. Beckett's translinguistic French style, and separation from Joyce, are shown to be mediated by Kafka, who provided Beckett with a “way out” from the impasse of following in Joyce's wake. “Ooftish,” with its English-Yiddish title, appearing alongside Kafka's “The Housefather's Care” (1938), are shown to be crucial to Beckett's transition to a postnational perspective. The essay concludes with Beckett's “Premier Amour” (1946) and 1938 essay “Les Deux Besoins,” where a kind of geometric method analyzes the interaction of “deux essences,” illustrated with a “sort of Star of David” (Rabaté): a “dodecahedron” that alludes to the re-creation of overlapping languages in Beckett's later work.
The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 2015
This essay explores linguistic dissonance in Adorno and Beckett as a dismantling of “Sprachontolo... more This essay explores linguistic dissonance in Adorno and Beckett as a dismantling of “Sprachontologie,” and the excavation of buried lineage as a principle of literary influence in Molloy. The first section exposes the connections between Adorno's notes for his “Unnamable” essay and his 1933 Singspiel, “The Treasure of Indian-Joe,” with its pre-Beckettian vision of the canon formed through plunder that “gives birth astride a grave.” The second section reads the multiple lineages of Molloy that explode any single national or literary origin for language and identity. The “langue d'Oc” Moran hears as “Oc” in “Molloy,” as well as the “oy” that suggests the vibrancy of Yiddish, are treated as part of Molloy's redemption of the expelled expressions of other languages that have been swallowed, though not entirely forgotten. This “Dissonanz”—as Beckett's “German Letter” calls it—enabled the French Beckett, as a precursor figure for Adorno, to parody linguistic ontology: using Blanchot, Kafka, Rosenzweig, and others to portray standard language as a linguistic overlay, burial, and recovery of plundered tongues.
K. Les Juifs, l’Europe, le’XXI Siècle, 2022
Kafka and the Universal, 2000
Germanic Review, 2000
The creative brilliance of Appelfeld's The Age of Wonders is to show that the Ge... more The creative brilliance of Appelfeld's The Age of Wonders is to show that the German writing of Kafka was already double, open to Jewish and non-Jewish languages alike, part of a Jewish literature that might have been written in Ger-man but transmits deeply Jewish linguistic ...
Prooftexts a Journal of Jewish Literary History, 1999
Yiddish life. This concern with the difference between historyand memory gives Levite's ... more Yiddish life. This concern with the difference between historyand memory gives Levite's text an uncannily contemporary ring, as it presciently calls upon its readers to beware of the lures of an "objective" history. In recent debates on the differences between popular "memory" ...
Bamidbar: Journal for Jewish Philosophy, 2012
The essays that follow responded to a call for papers titled “Displaced Philologies: Translations... more The essays that follow responded to a call for papers titled “Displaced Philologies: Translations of the Other and the German Tradition.” Given at the University of Toronto in May 2017, these responses spoke to the German cultural canon's “multilingual aspects and the significance of its multiple origins, including literary permutations of the German tradition in non-Germanic languages and theory.” The second part of the call for papers might be called its most significant: since a language, like a dialogue, cannot be truly spoken unless it is formed by the other whom one translates—or in Goethe's language, “verschlingt” (Goethe)
or swallows—and in the violence of canonical language and its formation, seeks unsuccessfully to expel. Responses from “outside” of the German tradition are, therefore, in the following essays, especially significant: since so much of what formed “High German”—from the Minnesänger's “contrefacture” of the Troubadours, to Luther's partial ventriloquism of the Hebrew Bible and beyond—was imported from beyond proper German bounds. To recover the foreign voice that is so constitutive—as well as denied and distorted—by “national traditions,” and especially German, the view from outside, without any uncanny sense, is often the one closest to home.
The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 90:4, 335-357 This essay explores linguistic d... more The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 90:4, 335-357
This essay explores linguistic dissonance in Adorno and Beckett as a dismantling of “Sprachontologie,” and the excavation of buried lineage as a principle of literary influence in Molloy. The first section exposes the connections between Adorno’s notes for his
“Unnamable” essay and his 1933 Singspiel, “The Treasure of Indian-Joe,” with its pre-Beckettian vision of the canon formed through plunder that “gives birth astride a grave.”
The second section reads the multiple lineages of Molloy that explode any single national or literary origin for language and identity. The “langue d’Oc” Moran hears as “Oc”
in “Molloy,” as well as the “oy” that suggests the vibrancy of Yiddish, are treated as part of Molloy’s redemption of the expelled expressions of other languages that have been swallowed, though not entirely forgotten. This “Dissonanz”—as Beckett’s “German
Letter” calls it—enabled the French Beckett, as a precursor figure for Adorno, to parody linguistic ontology: using Blanchot, Kafka, Rosenzweig, and others to portray standard language as a linguistic overlay, burial, and recovery of plundered tongues.
"Kafka's Jewish Languages The Hidden Openness of Tradition David Suchoff 304 pages | 6 x 9 ... more "Kafka's Jewish Languages
The Hidden Openness of Tradition
David Suchoff
304 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth Dec 2011 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4371-0 | $65.00s | £42.50 |
"In Kafka's Jewish Languages David Suchoff quite persuasively argues that the Germanic interplay between high and low (Yiddish) languages and the rise of modern Hebrew account for far more of the plays and innovations of Kafka's writing than has previously been acknowledged. Suchoff's diligent, innovative, and supremely intelligent work adds significantly to Kafka scholarship and Judaic studies."—Henry Sussman, Yale University"
Using the methods of Frankfurt School theorists, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, Suchoff offe... more Using the methods of Frankfurt School theorists, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, Suchoff offers new readings of Dickens, Melville and Kafka that underscore the political and social critiques inherent in their novels. He also studies the historical origins of literary theory.
Canonization and Alterity
Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy, 2007
Kafka and the Universal, ed. Arthur Cools and Vivian Liska, 2012
On the satire of the universal as Kafka's means of expressing the plurality of Jewish and other c... more On the satire of the universal as Kafka's means of expressing the plurality of Jewish and other cultures type-cast as particular, or minor traditions. A comparison with Samuel Beckett's use of French to explode the colonizing box of English is drawn, with references to the redemptive humor from which both writers drew.
Traces de vie à Auschwitz: un manuscrit clandestin, 2022
A commentary on an Introduction, written in Yiddish, to a secret anthology of Yiddish writing as... more A commentary on an Introduction, written in Yiddish, to a secret anthology of Yiddish writing assembled in Auschwitz on January 3 1945.
If the earlier generations were like angels, we are like men; if they are like men, we are like d... more If the earlier generations were like angels, we are like men; if they are like men, we are like donkeys.
The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 2018
This essay considers Beckett's linguistics as a redemption of otherness, suggesting new sourc... more This essay considers Beckett's linguistics as a redemption of otherness, suggesting new sources for his well-known motif of digestion and expulsion from the German tradition. Watt as well as his postwar French are shown to signal a swallowing of Goethe on Beckett's part, and his notion of “das Fremde” as digested foreign origins. Beckett's poetics of ingestion are read in the context of his “Gnome,” a foreign voice both native to national literatures, and which seeks to escape its traditionally diminished and comically distorted form. Beckett's excretion of his origins is central to the motifs of re-digestion, expulsion, and recovery that identify his linguistics of canonical creation. This hidden Germanic tradition of theft, distortion, and expulsion of foreign treasures—the “Schatz” of “Indianer-Joe,” in Adorno's phrase—is in turn read as enabling Beckett's project of redeeming the displaced sources of his own canonical literary voice.
This essay explores the ways Kafka's transnational perspective works underground in Beckett's tex... more This essay explores the ways Kafka's transnational perspective works underground in Beckett's texts and mediates his move to French. The banning of Kafka's books in Germany, where Beckett spent parts of 1936–37, and Molloy (born “from my mother's arse”) are seen as Beckett's creative identification with the expelled. Moran's inability to digest the “Lager” in Molloy, and the visit of “Gaber”—anagrams “Rabe,” the Kafka/crow that escapes the “Grabe” or grave of banished but lively literary influences in this post–World War II process. Beckett's comment that Kafka's “form was not shaken by the experience it conveys” (1962) re-articulates such ingestion as part of the process of canonical creation. Beckett's translinguistic French style, and separation from Joyce, are shown to be mediated by Kafka, who provided Beckett with a “way out” from the impasse of following in Joyce's wake. “Ooftish,” with its English-Yiddish title, appearing alongside Kafka's “The Housefather's Care” (1938), are shown to be crucial to Beckett's transition to a postnational perspective. The essay concludes with Beckett's “Premier Amour” (1946) and 1938 essay “Les Deux Besoins,” where a kind of geometric method analyzes the interaction of “deux essences,” illustrated with a “sort of Star of David” (Rabaté): a “dodecahedron” that alludes to the re-creation of overlapping languages in Beckett's later work.
The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 2015
This essay explores linguistic dissonance in Adorno and Beckett as a dismantling of “Sprachontolo... more This essay explores linguistic dissonance in Adorno and Beckett as a dismantling of “Sprachontologie,” and the excavation of buried lineage as a principle of literary influence in Molloy. The first section exposes the connections between Adorno's notes for his “Unnamable” essay and his 1933 Singspiel, “The Treasure of Indian-Joe,” with its pre-Beckettian vision of the canon formed through plunder that “gives birth astride a grave.” The second section reads the multiple lineages of Molloy that explode any single national or literary origin for language and identity. The “langue d'Oc” Moran hears as “Oc” in “Molloy,” as well as the “oy” that suggests the vibrancy of Yiddish, are treated as part of Molloy's redemption of the expelled expressions of other languages that have been swallowed, though not entirely forgotten. This “Dissonanz”—as Beckett's “German Letter” calls it—enabled the French Beckett, as a precursor figure for Adorno, to parody linguistic ontology: using Blanchot, Kafka, Rosenzweig, and others to portray standard language as a linguistic overlay, burial, and recovery of plundered tongues.
K. Les Juifs, l’Europe, le’XXI Siècle, 2022
Kafka and the Universal, 2000
Germanic Review, 2000
The creative brilliance of Appelfeld's The Age of Wonders is to show that the Ge... more The creative brilliance of Appelfeld's The Age of Wonders is to show that the German writing of Kafka was already double, open to Jewish and non-Jewish languages alike, part of a Jewish literature that might have been written in Ger-man but transmits deeply Jewish linguistic ...
Prooftexts a Journal of Jewish Literary History, 1999
Yiddish life. This concern with the difference between historyand memory gives Levite's ... more Yiddish life. This concern with the difference between historyand memory gives Levite's text an uncannily contemporary ring, as it presciently calls upon its readers to beware of the lures of an "objective" history. In recent debates on the differences between popular "memory" ...
Bamidbar: Journal for Jewish Philosophy, 2012
The essays that follow responded to a call for papers titled “Displaced Philologies: Translations... more The essays that follow responded to a call for papers titled “Displaced Philologies: Translations of the Other and the German Tradition.” Given at the University of Toronto in May 2017, these responses spoke to the German cultural canon's “multilingual aspects and the significance of its multiple origins, including literary permutations of the German tradition in non-Germanic languages and theory.” The second part of the call for papers might be called its most significant: since a language, like a dialogue, cannot be truly spoken unless it is formed by the other whom one translates—or in Goethe's language, “verschlingt” (Goethe)
or swallows—and in the violence of canonical language and its formation, seeks unsuccessfully to expel. Responses from “outside” of the German tradition are, therefore, in the following essays, especially significant: since so much of what formed “High German”—from the Minnesänger's “contrefacture” of the Troubadours, to Luther's partial ventriloquism of the Hebrew Bible and beyond—was imported from beyond proper German bounds. To recover the foreign voice that is so constitutive—as well as denied and distorted—by “national traditions,” and especially German, the view from outside, without any uncanny sense, is often the one closest to home.
The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 90:4, 335-357 This essay explores linguistic d... more The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 90:4, 335-357
This essay explores linguistic dissonance in Adorno and Beckett as a dismantling of “Sprachontologie,” and the excavation of buried lineage as a principle of literary influence in Molloy. The first section exposes the connections between Adorno’s notes for his
“Unnamable” essay and his 1933 Singspiel, “The Treasure of Indian-Joe,” with its pre-Beckettian vision of the canon formed through plunder that “gives birth astride a grave.”
The second section reads the multiple lineages of Molloy that explode any single national or literary origin for language and identity. The “langue d’Oc” Moran hears as “Oc”
in “Molloy,” as well as the “oy” that suggests the vibrancy of Yiddish, are treated as part of Molloy’s redemption of the expelled expressions of other languages that have been swallowed, though not entirely forgotten. This “Dissonanz”—as Beckett’s “German
Letter” calls it—enabled the French Beckett, as a precursor figure for Adorno, to parody linguistic ontology: using Blanchot, Kafka, Rosenzweig, and others to portray standard language as a linguistic overlay, burial, and recovery of plundered tongues.
MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 1994
Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 1988
Market Forces figure a site of disruption in nineteenth-century narrative. Each of the four prece... more Market Forces figure a site of disruption in nineteenth-century narrative. Each of the four preceding critical analyses has well illumined these fictional sites for us, but these analyses have not dwelt on what such a narrative vision might withhold from our view. Elsie Michie's ...
MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 1996
Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 2009
Studies in Romanticism, 1991
Modern Fiction Studies, 2019