Marilyn Reizbaum

An obsession with “degeneration” was a central preoccupation of modernist culture at the start of the 20th century. Less attention has been paid to the fact that many of the key thinkers in “degeneration theory” – including Cesare Lombroso, Max Nordau, and Magnus Hirschfeld – were Jewish. Unfit: Jewish Degeneration and Modernism is the first in-depth study of the Jewish cultural roots of this strand of modernist thought and its legacies for modernist and contemporary culture. Marilyn Reizbaum explores how literary works from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, through James Joyce’s Ulysses to Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, the crime movies of Mervyn LeRoy, and the photography of Claude Cahun and Adi Nes manifest engagements with ideas of degeneration across the arts of the 20th century. This is a major new study that sheds new light on modernist thought, art and culture.

An obsession with “degeneration” was a central preoccupation of modernist culture at the start of the 20th century. Less attention has been paid to the fact that many of the key thinkers in “degeneration theory” – including Cesare Lombroso, Max Nordau, and Magnus Hirschfeld – were Jewish. Unfit: Jewish Degeneration and Modernism is the first in-depth study of the Jewish cultural roots of this strand of modernist thought and its legacies for modernist and contemporary culture. Marilyn Reizbaum explores how literary works from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, through James Joyce’s Ulysses to Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, the crime movies of Mervyn LeRoy, and the photography of Claude Cahun and Adi Nes manifest engagements with ideas of degeneration across the arts of the 20th century. This is a major new study that sheds new light on modernist thought, art and culture.

How does recent scholarship on ethnicity and race speak to the Jewish dimension of James Joyce’s writing? What light has Joyce himself already cast on the complex question of their relationship? This book poses these questions in terms of models of the other drawn from psychoanalytic and cultural studies and from Jewish cultural studies, arguing that in Joyce the emblematic figure of otherness is “the Jew.” The work of Emmanuel Levinas, Sander Gilman, Gillian Rose, Homi Bhabha, among others, is brought to bear on the literature, by Jews and non-Jews alike, that has forged the representation of Jews and Judaism in this century. Joyce was familiar with this literature, like that of Theodor Herzl. Joyce sholarship has largely neglected even these sources, however, including Max Nordau, who contributed significantly to the philosophy of Zionism, and the literature on the “psychobiology” of race—so prominent in the fin de siècle—all of which circulates around and through Joyce’s depictions of Jews and Jewishness. Several Joyce scholars have shown the significance of the concept of the other for Joyce’s work and, more recently, have employed a variety of approaches from within contemporary deliberations of the ideology of race, gender, and nationality to illuminate its impact. The author combines these approaches to demonstrate how any modern characterization of otherness must be informed by historical representations of “the Jew” and, consequently, by the history of anti-Semitism. She does so through a thematics and poetics of Jewishness that together form a discourse and method for Joyce’s novel.

How does recent scholarship on ethnicity and race speak to the Jewish dimension of James Joyce's writing? What light has Joyce himself already cast on the complex question of their relationship? This book poses these questions in terms of models of the other drawn from psychoanalytic and cultural studies and from Jewish cultural studies, arguing that in Joyce the emblematic figure of otherness is "the Jew." The work of Emmanuel Levinas, Sander Gilman, Gillian Rose, Homi Bhabha, among others, is brought to bear on the literature, by Jews and non-Jews alike, that has forged the representation of Jews and Judaism in this century. Joyce was familiar with this literature, like that of Theodor Herzl. Joyce sholarship has largely neglected even these sources, however, including Max Nordau, who contributed significantly to the philosophy of Zionism, and the literature on the "psychobiology" of race—so prominent in the fin de siècle—all of which circulates around and through Joyce's depictions of Jews and Jewishness. Several Joyce scholars have shown the significance of the concept of the other for Joyce's work and, more recently, have employed a variety of approaches from within contemporary deliberations of the ideology of race, gender, and nationality to illuminate its impact. The author combines these approaches to demonstrate how any modern characterization of otherness must be informed by historical representations of "the Jew" and, consequently, by the history of anti-Semitism. She does so through a thematics and poetics of Jewishness that together form a discourse and method for Joyce's novel.