|
CULTURE
ELIAS CANETTI: A SPANISH
POET OF GERMAN LANGUAGE
A
Celebration of the Nobel Laureate On His Centennial Anniversary
presented at the Center for Jewish History
       
Elias Caneti (July 25, 1905-August 14, 1954). Click on each photo. It
is a treat!
 Photo:
Elias Caneti.
Behind
the accessible smoothness of his autobiography, there is a reserve
which, twisting and taking on disguise, conceals an unsuspected
otherness, an ungraspable and unconceivable identity. (…) Both of
them are teaching us, day in and day out, how to unmask the mad
delusion of power and of death, and both remind us of a statement in
“The Human Province:”
“Everyone is the center of the world. Everyone.” Claudio Magris,
author of the “Danube,” winner of the 2001 Erasmus Prize.
On Sunday,
October 30, 2005, the American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck
Institute, and Centro Primo Levi at the Center for Jewish History
will present day-long festivities to mark the centennial year of
writer, intellectual, and Nobel Laureate, Elias Canetti. With
special events dedicated in several European cities to honor
Canetti’s 100th anniversary this past year, the Center
for Jewish History represents the only venue in the US to pay homage
to one of the great revolutionary thinkers of the 20th
century. The Center for Jewish History is located at 15 West 16
Street, New York City. Elias Canetti’s considerable reputation, and
one that is especially revered by his peers, is based largely on his
articulation – outside of ephemeral ideologies and short-lived
battles – of the way in which totalitarian rulers come to power
through the mythical culture of historical heroes.
 
Photos
from L to R: #1. Caneti in 1904, the child. #3. Caneti the man and
the poet.
Through films, readings, and
talks by preeminent scholars at the Center, audiences will be given
a rare opportunity to participate in a dialogue exploring the link
between Canetti’s Sephardic roots and his Mittlel European identity
that formed the basis for his ideas. Of all his contemporaries,
Canetti is the one who by the very nature of his persona and his
writings, most drastically defies general expectation and eludes
specific explanation. The internationally acclaimed Italian author,
Claudio Magris, will lead the talks in exploring the man and his
work. Speakers from the academic community will examine Canetti’s
life-long reticence to be public, his eclectic; quasi-Renaissance
interest for the human experience as a whole; his annoyance at
ethnic labels; the almost disorienting absence in his writing of any
obvious rhetoric and any ready-made morale; the unemotional way in
which he analyzes the ability of humans to commit horrors; all of
which contributed to alienating Canetti from the wider readership he
so richly deserved. Yet, writers and intellectuals with an
international perspective, e.g. the late Susan Sontag or Salman
Rushdie have been able to treasure these traits and have written
beautifully of the importance of Canetti’s thought, placing his work
into an immediate relation to American culture. This event is
presented by the Primo Levi Center, the Leo Baeck Institute, and the
American Sephardi Federation and is made possible through the
generous contributions of The Cahnman Foundation, the Italian
Cultural Institute, and the New York Council for the Humanities, a
State affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
 Photo:
The tomb stele of Caneti in Zurich.
P rogram
schedule: Sunday, October 30, 2005 , Brunch time film screening , 12
noon - ELIAS CANETTI by Thomas Honickel, Germany, 2005. (60 min.,
German w/English subtitles. U.S. premiere). Talks and debates
2:00 pm - 5:00 pm , Gloria Ascher,
Tufts University , Michael
Taussig, Columbia University
, Dagmar Barnouw, University of
Southern California , Robert
Elbaz, University of Haifa
. Readings,
lecture, and public dialogue
7:30 pm - An evening salon on Elias Canetti with Claudio Magris and
other guests. Introduced and moderated by Liliane Weissberg,
University of Pennsylvania.
For reservations,
please call the Center for Jewish History Box Office at 917-606-8200.
Film & talks: $20 and $10 students /faculty, and members of LBI and
ASF. Evening lecture: $20 and $10 students/faculty, and members
of LBI and ASF. The Date Palm Café will remain open all day. All-day
Pass: $35 (includes 10% discount at the bookstore and café). This
event is presented by the Primo Levi Center, the Leo Baeck Institute,
and the American Sephardi Federation and is made possible through the
generous contributions of The Cahnman Foundation, the Italian Cultural
Institute, and the New York Council for the Humanities, a State
affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The following
organizations have contributed to the outreach for this symposium:
Center for the Humanities at CUNY Graduate Center, Institute for the
Humanities at New York University, the Goethe Institute New York, the
Deutsches Haus at NYU, and the National Book Foundation.The Canetti
Centennial Celebration is being presented as part of the Gisella Levi
Cahnman Open Seminar Series at the Center for Jewish History, which
brings together international scholars and public audiences. It is
made possible through the support of the Cahnman Foundation, the
Italian Cultural Institute and the New York Council for the
Humanities, a State affiliate of the National Endowment for the
Humanities. For further information and a complete press packet,
including biographical information on Elias Canetti, Cluadio Magris
and speakers, visit
www.cjh.org.
You may also contact Natalia Indrimi, Program Curator for the Center
for Jewish History at 212-294-8314,
nindrimi@cjh.org.
|
|
Get 6 general interest and bestseller books
for 99¢
|
Get 6 general interest and bestseller books
for $2
|
Get 6 general interest and bestseller books
for $1
|
All books only $9.95. Shipping is always free!
|
|
|
Get 6 mystery books for 99¢
|
Get 7 romance books for 99¢
|
Get 2 free books and a free gift (S&H is free)
|
Get 5 science fiction and fantasy books for $1
|
|
|
Get 4 African-American books for $4 plus a
free tote bag
|
Get 4 craft and hobby books for $4 and a free
tote
|
Get 4 cookbooks for $4
|
Get 5 Christian books for 99¢
|
|
|
Get 8 children's books for $2 plus a free pair
of bookends
|
Get 8 kids books for $2 plus a free pair of
bookends
|
Get 7 FREE Disney storybooks & a FREE
Backpack!
|
Get 7 FREE Dr. Seuss & His Friends books & a
FREE Backpack!
|
 Biographical
Information on Elias Canetti AND HIS WORK
Novelist, essayist, sociologist, and playwright, Elias Canetti, was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. Canetti was born in
Roustschouk, a small port in Bulgaria on the river Danube, into a
well-to-do Jewish family of Sephardic descent. His parents Jacques
Canetti and Mathilde Canetti run an amateur theater. One of his
brothers became a famed producer who launched among others, Georges
Brassens, Jacques Brel, Serge Gainsbourg, and Boris Vian. At age
six, his family moved to Manchester, England. After the death of his
father, his mother took the family to Vienna. From 1916 to 1921
Canetti studied in Zürich, and produced his first literary work.
During a visit to Berlin in 1928 he met Bertolt Brecht, Isaak Babel,
and George Grosz, and started to plan a series of novels on the
subject of human madness. He graduated in 1929 with a Ph.D. in
chemistry from the University of Vienna, where he became exposed to
the salon of Karl Kraus and met his lifelong companion Venethiana
Taubner-Calderon. In 1938 he fled to Paris and a year later to
England, where he lived for the rest of his life. Canetti has
defined himself by defining his languages: “A Spanish poet of German
language;” “The only literary person in whom the languages of the
two great expulsions are found in close proximity."
The dialogue between his
Sephardic roots and his Mittel-European identity is essential to his
self-perception, and at the same time is what makes his experience
completely foreign to many, Jews and non-Jews. His place in the
history of ideas is twice removed from the current “center:” The
entire historical memory he represents is rooted in the exile from
Spain and the successful resettlement all across Europe and the
Ottoman Empire of a highly sophisticated, integrated, and
multifaceted strand of the people of the book. Canetti’s mental map
lies on the European-Ottoman axle, which, by the end of World War I,
had been supplanted by the Soviet-American axle. Secondly,
even in the face of what he defines as “Hitler’s most monstrous
undertaking,” Canetti chooses to continue his battle against “the
culture of the survivor,” which his people, the Jews of Spain, had
always, even as
conversos,
refused to accept as a possible way of life. To understand Canetti,
his fierce rejection of death, and the adoring exploration of life
in all its forms, colors, inventive as well as destructive
manifestations, his non-normative, ever-open approach to the queries
of the mind, we must understand the Sephardic perspective on history
and the way in which Inquisition changed the face of Europe.
Furthermore, from the Sephardic tradition of sages, healers,
thinkers, and practitioners of all trades of life, Canetti draws a
form of humility that has long been won over by the “culture of the
survivor.” It’s a humility that at the same time regards one’ self
as a respected given, valuable part of the creation, but not as a
primary object of one’s own inquiry.
A humility
thanks to which one’s ego does not need to be harnessed, because it is
simply understood as one of the many points of view co-existing in the
universe. It is precisely in this perspective that his three
autobiographical works can be better understood, not as a way to
conceal his “true” (and possibly mystifying) self, as most critics
lament, but as a way to use facts from one’s relatively (un)important
life, to disclose a broader human reality. This background is equally
relevant to fully appreciate Canetti’s masterpiece,
Auto-da-Fé.
Auto-da-fé is a puzzling work.
It is a modern epic on the folly brought about by the separation of
the book from the world. Unlike Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451, however,
Auto-da-Fé
does not entrust to the book per se any saving power. While composing
some of the most heartbreaking paragraphs on book burning, Canetti
clearly sees that the book is an instrument, a means of expression and
communication, but is not the primary source of life. Nor can be
called upon as a justification for isolation or death. For Canetti
the ultimate responsibility to communicate and renew life rests with
no other but man.
THE
SPEAKERS
Gloria
Joyce Ascher was born
in the Bronx, New York of parents from Izmir, Turkey. Descended from
the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, she grew up in the Sephardic
(Judeo-Spanish) tradition. She attended the Bronx High School of
Science, Hunter College (B.A., summa cum laude), the University of
Bonn, Germany (Fulbright Grant), and Yale University (M.A., Ph.D.,
Germanic Languages and Literatures). She is the co-director of the
Program in Judaic Studies at Tufts University. Her Ladino
(Judeo-Spanish) Language and Culture course is the only one offered by
a US college. Gloria Ascher also teaches German and Scandinavian
literature. She is a writer and composer. Her poems are included in
the trilingual (Judeo-Spanish, German, and Turkish) anthology of
Sephardic poetry published in Austria in 2002 as part of the series
“Lyrik der Wenigerheiten” (poetry of minority peoples). Ascher’s
translation of Matilde Koén-Sarano’s two-volume Ladino grammar text
(2002, 2003) is the only Ladino grammar available in English.
 Dr.
Professor Dagmar Barnouw
Dr. Barnouw
is a professor of German and Comparative
Literature at the University of Southern California. She has taught at
Brown University, University of Texas and as a guest professor at
numerous German universities, notably a semester at Rostock
University. Her research and teaching has been interdisciplinary,
extending into the fields of historiography, anthropology, sociology,
political science, the history and theory of documentary photography,
and more recently also clinical and cognitive psychology. She is the
author of 11 books, including studies of Eduard Moerikes poetry, the
cultural politics of Thomas Mann, of Elias Canetti's poetic
anthropology and sociology of death (1979 and 1996), on utopian
discourse from Thomas More to feminist science fiction (1985); her
books published in the US include
Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity
(1988); Visible Spaces: Hannah
Arendt and the German-Jewish Experience
(1990); Critical Realism:
History, Photography, and the Work of Siegfried Kracauer
(1994); Germany 1945 Views of
War and Violence (1997);
Naipaul’s Strangers (2003).
Her current book project is The
Uses of Remorse: Memory and Politics in Postwar Germany
which begins with
a critical comparative discussion of fundamentalisms in political
Zionism and Islam.
Professor of German and Comparative
Literature, (Ph.D. Yale University). Fields of research and teaching:
the intellectual history and theory of cultural and political
modernity (18th to 21st century), Dagmar Barnouw came to USC's
Departments of German and Comparative Literature in 1988 from
positions as Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Brown
University (1981-1985; Associateprofessor 1979-1981) and the
University at Texas at Austin (1985-1988). She has taught as a guest
professor at numerous German universities, notably a semester at
Rostock University (German Democratic Republic, 1982. Her numerous
grants and awards include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship
(1983/84), a Getty Senior Research Fellowship (1993/94), a Humboldt
Senior Research Award Fellowship (1997/98); two Phi Kappa Phi USC
Faculty Recognition Book Awards (1991 and 1998); a USC Associates
Award for Creativity in Research and Scholarship (1998) and a variety
of book prizes and nominations including Choice's "Outstanding
Academic Book of 1990" and the Maine Photographic Workshops Award,
Best Critical Photographic Study (1997) . Her research and teaching
has been interdisciplinary, extending into the fields of
historiography, anthropology, sociology, political science, the
history and theory of documentary photography, and more recently also
clinical and cognitive psychology. She is the author of 11 books,
including studies of Eduard Moerikes poetry, the cultural politics of
Thomas Mann, of Elias Canetti's poetic anthropology and sociology of
death (1979 and 1996), on utopian discourse from Thomas More to
feminist science fiction (1985); her books published in the US include
Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity (1988);
Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the German-Jewish Experience
(1990); Critical Realism: History, Photography, and the Work of
Siegfried Kracauer (1994); Germany 1945 Views of War and
Violence (1997); Naipaul’s Strangers (2003). In a large
number of essays and research articles she has explored contemporary
cultural and political issues in the context of their history,
including questions of feminism, technocracy and the politics of
identity, modernity and documentarism (verbal and photographic), the
cultural politics of memory, and most recently the growing power of
fundamentalisms in both Western and non-Western political culture. Her
current book project is The Uses of Remorse: Memory and Politics in
Postwar Germany which begins with a critical comparative
discussion of fundamentalisms in political Zionism and Islam.
Born in Morocco
under French colonization,
Robert Elbaz
is professor and chairman of French studies at the University of
Haifa. He received his PhD. in comparative literature from McGill
University. A literary critic and a fascinating reader of Maghrebian,
Mediterranean, and Sephardic literature of the 20th
century, Elbaz wrote on extensively on authors such as Tahar Ben-Jelloun,
Albert Memmi, Mouloud
Feraoun, Rachid Mimouni, Albert Cohen, Elias Canetti. Robart Elbaz’
interests span from semiotics to 19th century political
theory and many of his studies wrestle with the notion of marginality
in the narrative of the contemporary global world. The shifting of
cultural paradigms and power centers from Europe and the former
Ottoman Empire to the United States and former Soviet Union provides
the backdrop for some of his work on the theory of autobiography and
the changing nature of the self. His new book, Literature and Society
in Elias Canetti will be published in January.
 Photo: Claudio
Magris
An
internationally acclaimed writer, scholar and public figure,
Claudio Magris
began his literary career in 1963 when, at the age of 24, he published
his first book,
Il mito absburgo nella
letteratura austriaca moderna (The Hapsburg Myth in Modern Austrian
Literature).
One of the last commentators of Central European intellectual history.
Magris has significantly contributed to contextualize for a broad
readership the works of such writers as Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von
Hofmansthal, Karl Kraus, Franz Kafka, Elias Canetti, and Joseph Roth.
 Their
books, collectively and individually, document the dissolution of the
Hapsburg Empire and reveal the existential predicament of individuals
faced with the cultural crisis of a once monolithic social order.
Magris's most critically acclaimed works are
Danube,
published in Italy in 1986 and in the United States in 1989, and
Microcosms,
which was published in Italy in 1997 where it won the Strega Prize,
Italy's top literary award; it was published in English by Harvill
Press.
 Michael
Taussig is a
professor of anthropology at Columbia University and is considered one
of the most eminent cultural anthropologists and public intellectuals
working in the United States today. With an international reputation
for scholarly work that crosses disciplinary boundaries, addresses
contemporary issues and is innovatively engaged with the process of
writing and performance, Professor Taussig speaks to and writes for a
broad audience within and outside the academy. An Australian by birth
and originally trained in medicine at the University of Sydney,
Professor Taussig's internationally renowned major works have been
stimulated by continuing fieldwork in South America, principally
Colombia, over more than thirty years. His writing has addressed areas
of theoretical interest in the social sciences and humanities apart
from anthropology, including geography, history, political science,
cultural studies, post-colonial studies, international studies and
creative writing. Taussig has talked about Elias Canetti in relation
to ethnological concepts expressed in
Crowds and Power.
Since Michael Taussig began fieldwork in 1969 in
Colombia his writing has spanned different issues in roughly the
following order: two books in Spanish for local people on the history
of slavery and its aftermath, and books and articles in academic
journals on 1) commercialization of agriculture, 2) slavery, 3)
hunger, 4) the popular manifestations of the working of commodity
fetishism, 5) the impact of colonialism (historical and contemporary)
on "shamanism" and folk healing, 6) the relevance of modernism and
post-modernist aesthetics for the understanding of ritual, 7) the
making, talking, and writing of terror, 8) mimesis in relation to
sympathetic magic, state fetishism, and secrecy, and 9) defacement.
Much of his work is an attempt to develop new forms of cultural
artifactuality in the writing itself. His two most recent books are
Law
in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza (The New Press, 2003),
and My Cocaine Museum (Chicago U.P., 2004).
 Liliane
Weissberg
is professor of Germanic languages and literatures at University of
Pennsylvania. She is an extensively published scholar and frequent
lecturer both in the U.S. and abroad. After completing her M.A. at the
Freie Universität Berlin, she earned her A.M. and Ph.D. in comparative
literature from Harvard. She arrived at Penn from Johns Hopkins
University in 1989 and was named the Joseph B. Glossberg Term
Professor in the Humanities (Almanac
October 21, 2003). She has had visiting appointments at universities
throughout Germany. Before her current term as graduate chair of the
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Liliane Weissberg
served for seven years as chair of the Program in Comparative
Literature and Literary Theory. She teaches a wide range of
undergraduate and graduate courses and is a member of the Center for
Folklore and Ethnography, the graduate group in art history, the
Jewish Studies Program, and the Women's Studies Program. Her
commitment to teaching was recognized in 2003 with a Lindback Award (Almanac
April 22, 2003).
Dr.
Liliane Weissberg, Professor of
German and Comparative Literature, has been reappointed the Joseph
B. Glossberg Term Professor in the Humanities, a title she has held
since 1998. After completing her M.A. at the Freie Universität Berlin,
Dr. Weissberg earned both her A.M. and Ph.D. in comparative
literature at Harvard University. Before
coming to Penn in 1989, Dr. Weissberg taught at Harvard University,
Hochschule der Künste Berlin, and The Johns Hopkins University. In
addition to her faculty position in the department of Germanic
Languages and Literatures, she is a member of the Center for Folklore
and Ethnography, the Jewish Studies Program, the art history graduate
group, and the advisory committee in Women's Studies. Since 1986, Dr.
Weissberg has held visiting appointments throughout Germany, including
a professorship at Hochschule für Jüdische Studien in Heidelberg this
past summer.Dr. Weissberg's research interests include German,
American, and French literature; literary theory; aesthetics; and
cultural studies. To address themes of German-Jewish literary and
cultural tradition, her recent work focuses on Jewish women writers of
the early 19th century. Distinguished scholarship in these fields has
earned her fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for
the Humanities, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture as well
as recognition from the Netherlands-America Association. In April, Dr.
Weissberg received a Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation
Award to honor her commitment to teaching excellence. In addition
to publishing close to 100 articles, she has authored or edited ten
books and recently completed a monograph entitled Approaching
Gentility: Early German-Jewish Autobiography and the Quest for
Acculturation. She currently serves as general editor of the book
series Kritik: German Literary Theory and Cultural Studies and
is on the editorial boards of the Lessing Yearbook, Poe
Studies, and Medienkultur. Dr. Weissberg has shared her
expert commentary on BBC WorldServices and CBC in Toronto broadcasts.
Contact:
Natalia Indrimi, Program Curator,
212-294-8314;
nindrimi@cjh.org
Eric Katzman, Public Relations,
212-294-8252;
ekatzman@cjh.org
_Advertisement__
A NEW AND
EXCITING SERVICE TO OUR READERS!
 The
International News Agency now offers a most unusual service to its readers!
For a token fee of $500 (Regular price $2,000), our artists will design the
perfect website for you. This fee is less than what you would pay if
you struggled to design it yourself. This is especially true if you
consider the time you would spend learning how to understand the software, and
for the tedious process of designing. What’s more, a do-it-yourself website
never looks as professional as the beautiful product you will receive from us.
We will link your site free of charge to the
International News Agency, instantly connecting you to millions of readers!
Write to us at
ads@internationalnewsagency.org and please provide the information you want on your
site.
And very soon –within 2 to 3 days, you will have a beautiful,
clever and professional website – an absolute necessity these days for
anyone with products or services, or a message to convey to the world.
|
|
.
DID YOU READ LATELY ?
THE LONDON MONTHLY
HERALD
THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD
DAILY NEWS
Click Here
|
FREE ACCESS TO THE
PUBLICATIONS OF THE LONDON MONTHLY HERALD |
|
.
|
