- Holocaust Themed Literature, Hannah Arendt, Ernst Cassirer, Edward Said, German-Jewish Literature (Jewish Studies), German-Jewish Studies, and 31 moreHolocaust Studies, Holocaust Literature, Erich Auerbach, Richard Rorty, Literature and Trauma, European Cinema, Pragmatism, Trauma Studies, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Critical and Cultural Theory, English and Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Literature, Memory Studies, John Dewey, Literary Theory, Contemporary Literature, Robert Brandom, Testimony, World Literature, Critical Theory, Jewish Studies, Cultural Studies, Holocaust, Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Memory, History of Political Thought, Pragmatism (Philosophy), Testimonial Literature, Holocaust and Film, Imperialism, and Political Theoryedit
- Ned Curthoys joined the discipline of English and Cultural Studies at UWA in January 2014. Previously he was a resear... moreNed Curthoys joined the discipline of English and Cultural Studies at UWA in January 2014. Previously he was a research fellow in the School of Cultural Inquiry and an ARC post-doctoral fellow in the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, at the ANU. His early research focused on the revival of the humanist tradition of classical rhetoric in contemporary literary criticism, philosophy, and political theory. More recently he has researched and published on the literary interests of the political theorist Hannah Arendt, and co-edited a book on the intellectual and political legacy of Edward Said. He has also published on German Jewish literature and philosophy from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries and discussed the fiction and political activism of Albert Camus in the context of the Algerian war. His monograph The Legacy of Liberal Judaism: Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt's Hidden Conversation was published by Berghahn Books in September 2013, paperback edition in 2016.
Key research
Holocaust themed literature and film with a focus on the representation legacy of Arendt's notion of 'the banality of evil', comparative literature studies with a focus on the work of Edward Said, Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, the thought of Hannah Arendt, eighteenth century intellectual history, German Jewish studies from Moses Mendelssohn to Hannah Arendt, Jewish studies, Israel/Palestine.edit
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I was profoundly honoured when Arena asked me to review its contributions on the Middle East. No other independent publisher has been so committed to the task of both (re-)describing our geopolitical situation and offering prescriptions... more
I was profoundly honoured when Arena asked me to review its contributions on the Middle East. No other independent publisher has been so committed to the task of both (re-)describing our geopolitical situation and offering prescriptions for redress that are neither shrill nor doctrinaire. Admirably, Arena has resisted the professionalized peer-reviewed journal's drift towards specialization and coterie discussion; it has taken no notice of the niche journal's fetish for theoretical shadow-boxing, the narcissism of small differences that has increasingly depoliticized academic discussion. Instead, in Arena's pages, sober analysis of current affairs shares space with philosophical meditation, expansive cultural criticism and utopian speculation. For Arena the only remit that matters is that of urgent and robust critique. Still, I have to confess to approaching the task of reviewing Arena's commentary on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a degree of dread. Arena'...
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Introduction - Alexander Cook, Ned Curthoys and Shino Konishi Part I: Humanity and the Civilizing Process 1 Representing Humanity during the French Revolution: Volney's 'General Assembly of Peoples' - Alexander Cook 2... more
Introduction - Alexander Cook, Ned Curthoys and Shino Konishi Part I: Humanity and the Civilizing Process 1 Representing Humanity during the French Revolution: Volney's 'General Assembly of Peoples' - Alexander Cook 2 Representing Woman: Historicizing Women in the Age of Enlightenment - Mary Spongberg 3 Sheer Folly and Derangement: How the Crusades Disoriented Enlightenment Historiography - John Docker 4 Turning Things Around Together: Enlightenment and Conversation - Jon Mee 5 Moses Mendelssohn and the Character of Virtue - Ned Curthoys Part II: Encountering Humanity 6 Songs from the Edge of the World: Enlightenment Perceptions of Khoikhoi and Bushmen Music - Vanessa Agnew 7 Joshua Reynolds and the Problem of Human Difference - Kate Fullagar 8 Francois Peron's Meditation on Death, Humanity, and Savage Society - Shino Konishi 9 Neither Civilized nor Savage: The Aborigines of Colonial Port Jackson, Through French Eyes, 1802 - Nicole Starbuck 10 The Difficulty of becoming a Civilized Human: Orientalism, Gender and Sociability in Montesquieu's Persian Letters - Hsu-Ming Teo Part III: The Limits of Humanity 11 Fictions of Human Community - Jonathan Lamb 12 Fairy-Tale Humanity in French Libertine Fiction of the Mid-Eighteenth Century - Peter Cryle 13 Philosophical Anthropology and the Sadean System or, Sade and the Question of Enlightenment Humanism - Henry Martyn Lloyd
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... STEPHEN J. WHITFIELD graduated from Tulane University, holds a master's degree from Yale (where he specialized in modern European history) and a ... It occurred to Elie Wiesel, who also noticed the defendant's utter... more
... STEPHEN J. WHITFIELD graduated from Tulane University, holds a master's degree from Yale (where he specialized in modern European history) and a ... It occurred to Elie Wiesel, who also noticed the defendant's utter banality, that "if he were sane, I should choose mad-ness. ...
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This article argues that two significant recent influential historical novels about the Holocaust, Hitler ’ s Daughter (1999) and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006), reprise the genre traits of the Bildungsroman or novel of development... more
This article argues that two significant recent influential historical novels about the Holocaust, Hitler ’ s Daughter (1999) and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006), reprise the genre traits of the Bildungsroman or novel of development and can be regarded as remarkably effective in engaging an active reader. Both novels, intended for children and younger adolescent readers, are focused on initially sequestered child protagonists from a perpetrator culture who are unable to fully understand their circumstances but undergo formative experiences by leaving ‘home’, legible both as a physical domicile and a site of indoctrination and repression. As they journey away from a limited conception of biological family the novel’s protagonists are able to reject constricting modes of social conditioning that repress authentic self-expression, curiosity, and impartial ethical judgment. In both novels the protagonists transform their perception of their circumstances by becoming resourceful bricoleurs, unearthing imaginative possibilities in their immediate environment that allow them to forestall emotional isolation and the dehumanization of designated ‘Others’ such as the Jews. The article suggests that while The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas has been read as reinforcing the myth of German innocence, its typological representation of a ‘dangerous family’ and its implied affirmation of Bruno’s explorative instincts, empathetic capacities, and commitment to friendship, allow a reader greater recognition of the ‘banal ideologies and institutions occupied by the perpetrator’ (Ann Rider).
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This essay suggests that Hannah Arendt was influenced by Ernst Cassirer's revival of the Kantian discourse of philosophical anthropology, an approach which critiqued metaphysical and environmentally determinist theories of... more
This essay suggests that Hannah Arendt was influenced by Ernst Cassirer's revival of the Kantian discourse of philosophical anthropology, an approach which critiqued metaphysical and environmentally determinist theories of human nature and instead interpreted human ...
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This essay offers a reconsideration of the ethical vocabulary, social possibilities and religious worldview enabled by the German concept of Bildung, or human self-cultivation, a concept which was enthusiastically adopted by German Jews... more
This essay offers a reconsideration of the ethical vocabulary, social possibilities and religious worldview enabled by the German concept of Bildung, or human self-cultivation, a concept which was enthusiastically adopted by German Jews in the late eighteenth century. By examining the creative use of the concept by German Jewish philosophers such as Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) and, later, in a very different political context, Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), the article challenges a body of scholarship that interprets the German Jewish enthusiasm for Bildung as an assimilationist capitulation by post-emancipation German Jews to the individualism and rationalism of the German Enlightenment. In contrast, I suggest that both Mendelssohn and Cassirer saw Bildung's emphasis on the vita activa as offering a vehicle for multifarious human engagement with the world that inspired not only a movement beyond reified conceptions of tradition, whether religious or secular, but forms of activism that could combine cosmopolitan sympathies with communal affiliation.
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This essay discusses Howard Jacobson’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Finkler Question as an intervention into a long running debate about whether global civil society has learnt lasting ethical and political lessons from the... more
This essay discusses Howard Jacobson’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Finkler Question as an intervention into a long running debate about whether global civil society has learnt lasting ethical and political lessons from the Holocaust. I argue that to date the novel’s critical reception has failed to recognise the novel’s desire to be read as an edifying political allegory or cautionary tale warning of a dangerous, historically familiar recrudescence of antisemitism that may be a prelude to a ‘Second Holocaust’. Exploring the reluctance of the mostly celebratory reception of the novel to acknowledge its direct political implications, the essay compares the public-political positions taken by Howard Jacobson, well known as a newspaper commentator in Britain, to the complex humanism evident in the writings of the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi.
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This special issue of Humanities Research journal draws on a selection of papers from The Australian National University's 'Key Thinkers' lecture series, which I convened in 2008 and 2009 under the aegis of the Research School... more
This special issue of Humanities Research journal draws on a selection of papers from The Australian National University's 'Key Thinkers' lecture series, which I convened in 2008 and 2009 under the aegis of the Research School of Humanities. As a postgraduate at the University of Sydney in the early 2000s, I had the pleasure of hearing Ghassan Hage give an inspirational lecture on the acclaimed French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu as a contribution to their successful Key Thinkers lecture series, which was popular with the general public. In his leisurely, explorative and amiably digressive style - replete with anecdotes from recent field trips to Lebanon and Venezuela - Hage brilliantly evoked Bourdieu as a critical thinker and public intellectual, illuminating the personal investments and emancipative politics of a thinker who has been overshadowed by the more luminous representatives of French high theory. That Hage had recently given a powerful exposition of the applic...
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7 Edward Said's unhoused philological humanism Ned Curthoys The scholar who does not consistently limit himself to a narrow field of specialization and to a world of concepts held in common with a small circle of likeminded... more
7 Edward Said's unhoused philological humanism Ned Curthoys The scholar who does not consistently limit himself to a narrow field of specialization and to a world of concepts held in common with a small circle of likeminded colleagues, lives in the midst of a tumult of impressions and ...
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The pluralist, diasporic vision of Jewish identity articulated by German-Jewish intellectuals who sought to combat Christian anti-Semitism, ethnocentric and exclusive conceptions of German nationalism, and Eurocentric ideologies of... more
The pluralist, diasporic vision of Jewish identity articulated by German-Jewish intellectuals who sought to combat Christian anti-Semitism, ethnocentric and exclusive conceptions of German nationalism, and Eurocentric ideologies of modernity and progress are discussed. The views of Elia Shohat in her work 'Taboo memories, Diasporic visions: Columbus, Palestine' speaks about the bitter conflicts in the wake of the establishment of Israel, with Arabs and Jews being staged as enemies.
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Abstract: The late Edward Said remarked that we live in a post September 11 epoch of "warring monotheisms". It is a world threatened by reactionary moral agendas at once insular, punitive and cynical. Two recent books... more
Abstract: The late Edward Said remarked that we live in a post September 11 epoch of "warring monotheisms". It is a world threatened by reactionary moral agendas at once insular, punitive and cynical. Two recent books thoughtfully critique such prescriptive moral platforms and ...
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Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1. 'This Man of Our Destiny': Moses Mendelssohn, Nathan the Wise, and the emergence of a Liberal Jewish Ethos Chapter 2. Diasporic Visions: the emergence of Liberal Judaism Chapter 3. Abraham... more
Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1. 'This Man of Our Destiny': Moses Mendelssohn, Nathan the Wise, and the emergence of a Liberal Jewish Ethos Chapter 2. Diasporic Visions: the emergence of Liberal Judaism Chapter 3. Abraham Geiger Chapter 4. Hermann Cohen's Prophetic Judaism Chapter 5. Ernst Cassirer and the Ethical Legacy of Hermann Cohen Chapter 6. Ernst Cassirer: The Enlightenment as Counter-History Chapter 7. Hannah Arendt: The Task of the Historian Chapter 8. Hannah Arendt: A Question of Character Conclusion: The Legacies of Liberal Judaism Bibliography Index
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A genuinely collaborative, cross-cultural examination of the publication and reception of Australian literature in the German Democratic Republic, this work is a revealing case study for newly global accounts of the cultural Cold War.... more
A genuinely collaborative, cross-cultural examination of the publication and reception of Australian literature in the German Democratic Republic, this work is a revealing case study for newly global accounts of the cultural Cold War. 'A compelling case study of the cultural Cold War and its effect on literary exchange.' — Professor Wenche Ommundsen, University of Wollongong 'This is considered, nuanced scholarship of a high order, [with] surprising and illuminating results, far beyond what might have been thought possible … There are few works of cultural history that offer such a stark and startling dialogic opening-up.' — Professor Nicholas Jose, University of Adelaide Exploring the imaginative construction of the post-colonial South by the communist East, this collaborative study of the reception of Australian literature in the German Democratic Republic has resonance for all newly global reckonings of the cultural Cold War.
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Abstract: The pluralist, diasporic vision of Jewish identity articulated by German-Jewish intellectuals who sought to combat Christian anti-Semitism, ethnocentric and exclusive conceptions of German nationalism, and Eurocentric ideologies... more
Abstract: The pluralist, diasporic vision of Jewish identity articulated by German-Jewish intellectuals who sought to combat Christian anti-Semitism, ethnocentric and exclusive conceptions of German nationalism, and Eurocentric ideologies of modernity and progress are discussed. The ...
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Abstract: The late Edward Said remarked that we live in a post September 11 epoch of "warring monotheisms". It is a world threatened by reactionary moral agendas at once insular, punitive and cynical. Two recent books... more
Abstract: The late Edward Said remarked that we live in a post September 11 epoch of "warring monotheisms". It is a world threatened by reactionary moral agendas at once insular, punitive and cynical. Two recent books thoughtfully critique such prescriptive moral platforms and ...
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Page 1. 58 New FormatioNs HannaH arendt: a Question of CHaraCter Ned Curthoys Abstract This essay is about the ethical importance of 'character' or 'personality' in Hannah Arendt's political... more
Page 1. 58 New FormatioNs HannaH arendt: a Question of CHaraCter Ned Curthoys Abstract This essay is about the ethical importance of 'character' or 'personality' in Hannah Arendt's political philosophy. I argue that Arendt's ...
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In this essay I draw attention to the similarity between the post-war enthusiasm of both Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers for the cosmopolitan and geographically homeless 'citizen of the world' and... more
In this essay I draw attention to the similarity between the post-war enthusiasm of both Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers for the cosmopolitan and geographically homeless 'citizen of the world' and the twentieth century reprisal by emigre comparative literature scholars of ...
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This article argues that two significant recent influential historical novels about the Holocaust, Hitler’s Daughter (1999) and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006), reprise the genre traits of the Bildungsroman or novel of development... more
This article argues that two significant recent influential historical novels about the Holocaust, Hitler’s Daughter (1999) and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006), reprise the genre traits of the Bildungsroman or novel of development and can be regarded as remarkably effective in engaging an active reader. Both novels, intended for children and younger adolescent readers, are focused on initially sequestered child protagonists from a perpetrator culture who are unable to fully understand their circumstances but undergo formative experiences by leaving ‘home’, legible both as a physical domicile and a site of indoctrination and repression. As they journey away from a limited conception of biological family the novel’s protagonists are able to reject constricting modes of social conditioning that repress authentic self-expression, curiosity, and impartial ethical judgment. In both novels the protagonists transform their perception of their circumstances by becoming resourceful bricoleurs, unearthing imaginative possibilities in their immediate environment that allow them to forestall emotional isolation and the dehumanization of designated ‘Others’ such as the Jews. The article suggests that while The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas has been read as reinforcing the myth of German innocence, its typological representation of a ‘dangerous family’ and its implied affirmation of Bruno’s explorative instincts, empathetic capacities, and commitment to friendship, allow a reader greater recognition of the ‘banal ideologies and institutions occupied by the perpetrator’ (Ann Rider).
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A sustained analysis of the applicability of Foucault's conception of care of the self to Arendt's ethical concern with solitude as a precondition for internal conversation , personality formation, resistance to normative pressures.... more
A sustained analysis of the applicability of Foucault's conception of care of the self to Arendt's ethical concern with solitude as a precondition for internal conversation , personality formation, resistance to normative pressures. Genealogy of solitude in the work of Seneca, Montaigne.
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Analyses Littell's novel in the context of recent scholarship on character typologies in historical fiction and uses narrative theory to illuminate the novel's communicative strategies.
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The essay analyses Margarethe von Trotta’s 2012 biopic Hannah Arendt which focuses on Arendt’s attendance at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 as a reporter for the New Yorker, culminating in her controversial depiction of Eichmann as a... more
The essay analyses Margarethe von Trotta’s 2012 biopic Hannah Arendt which focuses on Arendt’s attendance at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 as a reporter for the New Yorker, culminating in her controversial depiction of Eichmann as a functionary who epitomised the “banality of evil” in our times. The film has been derided by some as hagiography because it tropes Arendt’s depiction of Eichmann as the visionary idea of a great thinker emerging under prejudicial circumstances. I argue that the film is agnostic about Arendt’s central thesis, instead inviting the spectator to reflect on the importance of civil courage, the willingness to dramatise one’s thought processes and expose one’s deliberations to the public gaze. Arendt’s conception of the ‘banality of evil’ projects beyond the Eichmann case because her students and youthful audience understand its critical potential in an age beset by imperial violence and technocratic instrumentalism.
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just published entry for Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought
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The Bildungsroman in a Genocidal Age argues that the humanist ideal of Bildung, the cultivation of the potentialities of the self through self-reflection, travel, and varied social intercourse, has been revitalized in an age of genocidal... more
The Bildungsroman in a Genocidal Age argues that the humanist ideal of Bildung, the cultivation of the potentialities of the self through self-reflection, travel, and varied social intercourse, has been revitalized in an age of genocidal violence