Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Arkush, Allan

Titel

Relativizing Nationalism: The Role of Klesmer in George Eliot's "Daniel Deronda"

Ist Teil von

• Jewish social studies, 1997-04, Vol.3 (3), p.61-73

Ort / Verlag

New York: Indiana University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

1997

Quelle

EBSCOhost Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Although [Bernard Semmel], like most other readers, regards Daniel Deronda as an unequivocal expression of its author's nationalist tendencies and proto-Zionist sympathies, some scholars have suggested that the book's position on these matters is in fact somewhat ambiguous. In his Constructions of "the Jew" in English Literature and Society, Bryan Cheyette has called attention to the way in which [George Eliot] constructs "competing 'national-racial' and 'aesthetic-cultural' versions of her object of desire." His analysis of this competition leads Cheyette to conclude that there is "an unresolved tension in Daniel Deronda." It is not clear, he says, whether "Eliot's 'epic' narrative is concerned with the fixed semitic particularity of 'the Jews' or an all-inclusive universalism, signified by the proclaimed 'unity of mankind.'"(3) The challenge to "the centrality of Mordecai's racial determinism in Daniel Deronda" is in large part represented by the musician named Klesmer who "offers an alternative cultural mode of self-transcendence to Daniel's nascent Zionism."(4) According to Cheyette, "In his aesthetic, supra-nationalist identification with assimilated Jews, such as Rachel and Spinoza, Klesmer embodies the Arnoldian ideal of 'culture' which disrupts fatally Eliot's nationalist construction of 'Jewish' idealism."(5)