Born in Kassel, Franz Rosenzweig was a German philosopher of self-conscious Jewish affiliation and a charismatic leader in a circle of existentially minded contemporaries. His major work, The Star of Redemption (1921), presents a sui generis iteration of systematic hermeneutics, a way of proceeding in a world centred on ‘experiential philosophy’ [erfahrende Philosophie] and an ecumenical project of ‘speech-thinking’, or ‘thinking with others’ that influenced Emmanuel Levinas and Walter Benjamin, among others.
This book argues that modernists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf engaged creatively with modernity's expanding forms of collective experience and performative identities. Judith Paltin compares patterns of crowds in modernist Anglophone literature to historical arrangements and theories of democratic assembly to argue that an abstract construction of the crowd engages with the transformation of popular subjectivity from a nineteenth-century liberal citizenry to the contemporary sense of a range of political multitudes struggling with intersectional conditions of oppression and precarity. Modernist works, many of which were composed during the ascendancy of fascism and other populist politics claiming to be based on the action of the crowd, frequently stage the crowd as a primal scene for violence; at the same time, they posit a counterforce in more agile collective gatherings which clarify the changing relations in literary modernity between subjects and power.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.