Michele F Levy | North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (original) (raw)
Papers by Michele F Levy
World Literature Today, 2014
World Literature Today, 2015
World Literature Today, 2005
World Literature Today, 2016
world Literature Today, 2017
World Literature Today, 2018
World Literature Today, 2021
English laced with naturalism. It would be powerful to reimagine Cherokee people as modern and re... more English laced with naturalism. It would be powerful to reimagine Cherokee people as modern and relevant people thriving with an ancestral spirit in a fast-changing world, but here readers get a reinvented version of an old motif: romanticized victimhood.
World Literature Today, 2023
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2023. 331 pages. ALEKSANDAR HEMON'S brilliant new novel tell... more New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2023. 331 pages. ALEKSANDAR HEMON'S brilliant new novel tells the harrowing tale of its Sarajevan protagonist, Rafael (Rafe) Pinto. A homosexual, Viennese-educated, Sephardic Jew, Rafe remains an outsider in his hometown at the easternmost edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Raised by parents steeped in Torah and old Jewish songs and wisdom, Rafe runs his father's pharmacy. Since Sarajevo lacks the cultural and sexual riches of Vienna, Rafe lets laudanum soothe his woes. But after the Archduke Ferdinand's assassination near his shop, "the world exploded. " An imperial army conscript, Rafe endures great suffering on his forced walk from Sarajevo in 1913 to a Shanghai opium den in 1949. Through Rafe, a self-proclaimed "no one and nobody, " Hemon both testifies to the bleak history of the century that birthed our world and creates a haunting love story that transcends time, space, and death. World begins with Rafe's words, "The Holy One kept creating worlds and destroying them, " which underscore the eternal life-death cycle and open his one-sided discourse with God. Later, Rafe describes to fellow soldiers "the exact moment. .. that broke the world in two, before and after. " As creation/destruction converges with time past, present, and future, two central themes emerge: the search for meaning; and human versus metaphysical time. Alongside Hemon's irony, wit, fresh similes, graphic battle images, and gently erotic descriptions of Rafe and his beloved Osman, a Sarajevan Muslim soldier who
World Literature Today, 2023
BOOKS IN REVIEW swirling vortices of emotions followed by calm stillness. Salt and Pepper is an i... more BOOKS IN REVIEW swirling vortices of emotions followed by calm stillness. Salt and Pepper is an intriguing exploration of a poet's excursion into her innerscape, revealing the illuminating truths of life. Sukrita seems quite conscious of her vocabulary, and thus her language is so effortless that the whole collection reads with a tender flow. It is a joyful feast for connoisseurs of poetry. Mohammad Farhan Jamia Millia Islamia NORMAN MANEA'S Exiled Shadow comprises literary, philosophical, psychological, and metaphysical commentaries, memoir, poetry, and fiction. Its "plot" follows the Nomadic Misanthrope (whom I call NM)-the Holocaust-surviving, antifascist Jewish protagonist/narrator-from his rescue, repatriation to, and final expulsion from once-fascist, then-communist Rumania, to his final journey to "the country of exiles, " America, and Buster Keaton College (aka Bard). Mirroring Manea's biography, the text brilliantly weaves these threads together to ponder the difference between "the shadow (how one is perceived socially)" and "the soul (one's individual existence). " "Shadow" carries multiple meanings within the text. First, political shadows in despotic nations track and apprehend suspected dissidents, sending them on to higher-ups for punishment. Thus, reported by his psych doctor, NM finds himself, like Kafka's Josef K, under "house a-rest" by clownish bureaucrats. At the Securitate, a snide, self-righteous goon expels him from Rumania to Germany. But as NM notes, "If the autocratic and totalitarian regimes exile or kill those who cannot be made to fit within their norms, democratic, capitalist regimes find other, more insidious methods to isolate, marginalize, and neutralize such individuals. " Central to the text and paralleling NM's evolution, Adelbert von Chamisso's nineteenth-century Peter Schlemihl explores the shadow in its human con
World Literature Today, 2000
World Literature Today, 2014
L'Information psychiatrique, Sep 1, 2005
L’auteur temoigne de son experience en milieu carceral en qualite de psychiatre. Elle decrit le f... more L’auteur temoigne de son experience en milieu carceral en qualite de psychiatre. Elle decrit le fonctionnement carceral, la violence, l’arbitraire et l’illegalite qui existent en prison. Les pathologies psychiatriques rencontrees sont decrites avec leur specificite liee a l’environnement et a l’enfermement. La difficulte des prises en charge psychiatriques est abordee avec les risques de confusion entre traitement individuel et social mais aussi entre dangerosite psychiatrique et criminelle. La question de l’utilite preventive de la prison est posee.
World Literature Today, 2019
World Literature Today, 2013
World Literature Today, 2013
World Literature Today, 2010
World Literature Today, 2000
World Literature Today, 2010
World Literature Today, 2014
World Literature Today, 2015
World Literature Today, 2005
World Literature Today, 2016
world Literature Today, 2017
World Literature Today, 2018
World Literature Today, 2021
English laced with naturalism. It would be powerful to reimagine Cherokee people as modern and re... more English laced with naturalism. It would be powerful to reimagine Cherokee people as modern and relevant people thriving with an ancestral spirit in a fast-changing world, but here readers get a reinvented version of an old motif: romanticized victimhood.
World Literature Today, 2023
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2023. 331 pages. ALEKSANDAR HEMON'S brilliant new novel tell... more New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2023. 331 pages. ALEKSANDAR HEMON'S brilliant new novel tells the harrowing tale of its Sarajevan protagonist, Rafael (Rafe) Pinto. A homosexual, Viennese-educated, Sephardic Jew, Rafe remains an outsider in his hometown at the easternmost edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Raised by parents steeped in Torah and old Jewish songs and wisdom, Rafe runs his father's pharmacy. Since Sarajevo lacks the cultural and sexual riches of Vienna, Rafe lets laudanum soothe his woes. But after the Archduke Ferdinand's assassination near his shop, "the world exploded. " An imperial army conscript, Rafe endures great suffering on his forced walk from Sarajevo in 1913 to a Shanghai opium den in 1949. Through Rafe, a self-proclaimed "no one and nobody, " Hemon both testifies to the bleak history of the century that birthed our world and creates a haunting love story that transcends time, space, and death. World begins with Rafe's words, "The Holy One kept creating worlds and destroying them, " which underscore the eternal life-death cycle and open his one-sided discourse with God. Later, Rafe describes to fellow soldiers "the exact moment. .. that broke the world in two, before and after. " As creation/destruction converges with time past, present, and future, two central themes emerge: the search for meaning; and human versus metaphysical time. Alongside Hemon's irony, wit, fresh similes, graphic battle images, and gently erotic descriptions of Rafe and his beloved Osman, a Sarajevan Muslim soldier who
World Literature Today, 2023
BOOKS IN REVIEW swirling vortices of emotions followed by calm stillness. Salt and Pepper is an i... more BOOKS IN REVIEW swirling vortices of emotions followed by calm stillness. Salt and Pepper is an intriguing exploration of a poet's excursion into her innerscape, revealing the illuminating truths of life. Sukrita seems quite conscious of her vocabulary, and thus her language is so effortless that the whole collection reads with a tender flow. It is a joyful feast for connoisseurs of poetry. Mohammad Farhan Jamia Millia Islamia NORMAN MANEA'S Exiled Shadow comprises literary, philosophical, psychological, and metaphysical commentaries, memoir, poetry, and fiction. Its "plot" follows the Nomadic Misanthrope (whom I call NM)-the Holocaust-surviving, antifascist Jewish protagonist/narrator-from his rescue, repatriation to, and final expulsion from once-fascist, then-communist Rumania, to his final journey to "the country of exiles, " America, and Buster Keaton College (aka Bard). Mirroring Manea's biography, the text brilliantly weaves these threads together to ponder the difference between "the shadow (how one is perceived socially)" and "the soul (one's individual existence). " "Shadow" carries multiple meanings within the text. First, political shadows in despotic nations track and apprehend suspected dissidents, sending them on to higher-ups for punishment. Thus, reported by his psych doctor, NM finds himself, like Kafka's Josef K, under "house a-rest" by clownish bureaucrats. At the Securitate, a snide, self-righteous goon expels him from Rumania to Germany. But as NM notes, "If the autocratic and totalitarian regimes exile or kill those who cannot be made to fit within their norms, democratic, capitalist regimes find other, more insidious methods to isolate, marginalize, and neutralize such individuals. " Central to the text and paralleling NM's evolution, Adelbert von Chamisso's nineteenth-century Peter Schlemihl explores the shadow in its human con
World Literature Today, 2000
World Literature Today, 2014
L'Information psychiatrique, Sep 1, 2005
L’auteur temoigne de son experience en milieu carceral en qualite de psychiatre. Elle decrit le f... more L’auteur temoigne de son experience en milieu carceral en qualite de psychiatre. Elle decrit le fonctionnement carceral, la violence, l’arbitraire et l’illegalite qui existent en prison. Les pathologies psychiatriques rencontrees sont decrites avec leur specificite liee a l’environnement et a l’enfermement. La difficulte des prises en charge psychiatriques est abordee avec les risques de confusion entre traitement individuel et social mais aussi entre dangerosite psychiatrique et criminelle. La question de l’utilite preventive de la prison est posee.
World Literature Today, 2019
World Literature Today, 2013
World Literature Today, 2013
World Literature Today, 2010
World Literature Today, 2000
World Literature Today, 2010
The Enlightened West constructed itself as the very foundation of civilization and values, agains... more The Enlightened West constructed itself as the very foundation of civilization and values, against which all other cultures were judged and found wanting. But Freud revealed the “discontents” within the Western psyche, while a number of canonical literary protagonists journeyed beyond civilization to discover an “ampler, stranger, richer world…an abyss behind every bottom, beneath every ‘foundation’.” Among those fictional treks into the depths of the human psyche, the labyrinthine “cave of self,” that claim as common ancestors Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and Mann’s Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig [1912]), Uwe Timm’s The Snake Tree (Der Schlangenbaum, 1985) offers a postmodern revision of its modernist predecessors from the perspective of the end of the century they prophesied and helped to define. All three texts foreground Westerners whose wanderlust leads them into the unknown. But as Julia Kristeva asks, “… should one recognize that one becomes a foreigner in another country because one is already a foreigner from within?” Indeed, these journeys frame cogent critiques of a West that fears the Other in itself, for “what we most fear in the demonized other is our own mirror image: our othered self.” This terror of the repressed self, moreover, informs both our psyches and the institutions that protect us, or what Wendy Hamblet calls “home-craft,” the work of identity formation on the personal level, embodied societally in forms that mask the inner, and suppress the external, other.
(1865) and Tahar Ben Jelloun's Partir (2006) "A boundary is not that at which something stops but... more (1865) and Tahar Ben Jelloun's Partir (2006) "A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing." (Martin Heidegger, "Building, Dwelling, Thinking) In 1864, nearly two generations before W.E. B. Dubois coined the term "doubleconsciousness" and more than a century before postcolonial studies emerged, Dostoevsky critiqued the impact of Western culture on Russian society through his paradigmatic Underground Man. Defining "the educated man of the 19 th century," himself included, as
World Literature Today , 2015
World Literature Today, 2015
World Literature Today , 2017
Fierce poetry about Jamaican history
World Literature Today, 2024
World Literature Today, 2023
Review of the short story collection