Ned Curthoys
Biographic Data
| ID | 1434951 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ned Curthoys |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ned |
| FAMILY NAME | Curthoys |
| SIGNATURE | CURTHOYS N |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Western Australia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9082-8762 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 19 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Representing Jewish lives in the work of Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt
This article examines an underappreciated aspect of the corpus of Isaiah Berlin, his interest in biographical portraits of Jewish individuals including Moses Hess, Heinrich Heine, and Chaim Weizmann. It argues that a close study of Berlin’s biographical portraits reveals an interest in constructing a version of Jewish normality and strength of character according to the contribution those individuals have made to the Zionist movement. By contrast…
Literary Representations of the Palestine/Israel Conflict After the Second Intifada
Studies literary representations of Israel and Palestine that challenge mainstream political and historical discourses Provides a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the spectrum of emergent and existing literary forms that now represents the Palestine/Israel conflict to a global audience Brings together a geographically diverse team of literary and cultural studies researchers with depth of expertise in Palestine/Israel and Middle Eastern stu…
The Construction of an Active Reader in two Holocaust themed novels for children
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft. Thinking in Public
Thinking in Public by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft has conflicting objectives. The author wants to contribute, without resorting to prescriptive arguments, to swirling debates about the declining fortunes of the public intellectual in an era in which this invested figure is threatened by the sequestration of the scholar-activist into the auditing culture of the corporate university. Suspicious that the friction between the intellectual and her or his p…
On Active Solitude
Evaluating risk in perpetrator narratives
This article considers a surge in critical enthusiasm for Holocaust-themed fictions that manipulate empathetic response to endanger and destabilise a reader used to the reiteration of various pieties about the ineffable horror of those events. It argues that interpretive prisms stimulated by the rise of ethical criticism and the postcolonial turn in Holocaust studies are powerfully suggestive but in danger of privileging the self-problematising e…
Representing Humanity in the Age of Enlightenment
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: Enlightenm…
The missing British conversation
Tom Lawson’s book The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania is a timely historiographical intervention. It adroitly combines postcolonial criticism of Britain’s enduring imperial vanity with a c
Emily J. Levine. Dreamland of Humanists
As an admirer of the German Jewish scholars discussed in Emily J. Levine's Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School, I was enthusiastic about the prospect of reviewing her book. Its premise is one that I share. Levine argues that the efflorescence of German Jewish humanist scholarship in fields such as philosophy and art history, beginning in the Wilhelmine era, should not be understood as a process of deracinat…
Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Order
The Legacy of Liberal Judaism
Comparing the liberal Jewish ethics of the German-Jewish philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt, this book argues that both espoused a diasporic, worldly conception of Jewish identity that was anchored in a pluralist and politically engaged interpretation of Jewish history and an abiding interest in the complex lived reality of modern Jews. Arendt’s indebtedness to liberal Jewish thinkers such as Moses Mendelssohn, Abraham Geiger, Hermann …
Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question as Holocaust Pedagogy
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 recr…
Redescribing the Enlightenment
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 (1…
Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Rehabilitation of Literary Criticism as a ‘Kind of Writing’
The contribution of Richard Rorty to literary studies has not gone unnoticed since the passing of the most prominent pragmatist philosopher of his generation in 2007. Rorty thought of himself as an 'auxiliary to the poet rather than the physicist' (Contingency), because he was convinced, as Gunter Leypold explains, that narrative has shown itself to be 'a more effective world-making tool than traditional moral philosophy', in part because human s…
Tarrying with the Impossible’
In this essay I analyse the affirmation of diasporic Jewish identities in Ludmila Ulitskaya's Daniel' Shtainperevodchik (2006) which was translated into English as Daniel Stein, Interpreter (2011). I explore Ulitskaya's 'novel of ideas' as an imaginative contribution to the cognate critical fields of diaspora and translation studies as they affect the discussion of Jewish history, religion and ethics. Daniel Stein, Interpreter won the Russian Nat…
Hannah Arendt
This essay is about the ethical importance of ‘character’ or ‘personality’ in Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy. I argue that Arendt’s interest in the ‘valid personality which once acquired, never leaves a man’ (Men in Dark Times) is of axiomatic importance in her attempt, after the atrocities of the Second World War, to overturn the philosophical privileging of contemplation and eidetic intuition, and evoke thinking and judgment as quintessen…
Ernst Cassirer, Hannah Arendt, and the twentieth century revival of philosophical anthropology
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 being in cultural terms as ‘open to the world’. The article suggests that Arendt’s focus on human plurality as the condition of meaning and subject formation may have been influenced b…
A Diasporic Reading of Nathan the Wise
Research Article| January 01 2010 A DIASPORIC READING OF NATHAN THE WISE Ned Curthoys Ned Curthoys Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature Studies (2010) 47 (1): 70–95. https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.47.1.0070 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Ned Curthoys; A DIASPORIC READING OF NATHAN THE WISE. Comparative Literature Studies 1 January 2010; 47 (1): 70–95. d…
An Émigré Consciousness
Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Narrative
Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Narrative Ned Curthoys . . . authoritative discourse . . . demands our unconditional allegiance ... It is indissolubly fused with its authority—wiÃ1⁄4i political power, an institution, a person. . . . One cannot divide it up—agree with one part, accept but not completely another part, reject utterly a third part. ... A playing with distances, with fusion and dissolution, with approach and retreat, is not here pos…
Ernst Cassirer, Hannah Arendt, and the twentieth century revival of philosophical anthropology
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 being in cultural terms as ‘open to the world’. The article suggests that Arendt’s focus on human plurality as the condition of meaning and subject formation may have been influenced b…
Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Narrative
Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Narrative Ned Curthoys . . . authoritative discourse . . . demands our unconditional allegiance ... It is indissolubly fused with its authority—wiÃ1⁄4i political power, an institution, a person. . . . One cannot divide it up—agree with one part, accept but not completely another part, reject utterly a third part. ... A playing with distances, with fusion and dissolution, with approach and retreat, is not here pos…
An Émigré Consciousness
A Diasporic Reading of Nathan the Wise
Research Article| January 01 2010 A DIASPORIC READING OF NATHAN THE WISE Ned Curthoys Ned Curthoys Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature Studies (2010) 47 (1): 70–95. https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.47.1.0070 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Ned Curthoys; A DIASPORIC READING OF NATHAN THE WISE. Comparative Literature Studies 1 January 2010; 47 (1): 70–95. d…
Hannah Arendt
This essay is about the ethical importance of ‘character’ or ‘personality’ in Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy. I argue that Arendt’s interest in the ‘valid personality which once acquired, never leaves a man’ (Men in Dark Times) is of axiomatic importance in her attempt, after the atrocities of the Second World War, to overturn the philosophical privileging of contemplation and eidetic intuition, and evoke thinking and judgment as quintessen…
Ernst Cassirer, Hannah Arendt, and the twentieth century revival of philosophical anthropology
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 being in cultural terms as ‘open to the world’. The article suggests that Arendt’s focus on human plurality as the condition of meaning and subject formation may have been influenced b…
The Legacy of Liberal Judaism
Comparing the liberal Jewish ethics of the German-Jewish philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt, this book argues that both espoused a diasporic, worldly conception of Jewish identity that was anchored in a pluralist and politically engaged interpretation of Jewish history and an abiding interest in the complex lived reality of modern Jews. Arendt’s indebtedness to liberal Jewish thinkers such as Moses Mendelssohn, Abraham Geiger, Hermann …
Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question as Holocaust Pedagogy
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 recr…
Redescribing the Enlightenment
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 (1…
Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Rehabilitation of Literary Criticism as a ‘Kind of Writing’
The contribution of Richard Rorty to literary studies has not gone unnoticed since the passing of the most prominent pragmatist philosopher of his generation in 2007. Rorty thought of himself as an 'auxiliary to the poet rather than the physicist' (Contingency), because he was convinced, as Gunter Leypold explains, that narrative has shown itself to be 'a more effective world-making tool than traditional moral philosophy', in part because human s…
Tarrying with the Impossible’
In this essay I analyse the affirmation of diasporic Jewish identities in Ludmila Ulitskaya's Daniel' Shtainperevodchik (2006) which was translated into English as Daniel Stein, Interpreter (2011). I explore Ulitskaya's 'novel of ideas' as an imaginative contribution to the cognate critical fields of diaspora and translation studies as they affect the discussion of Jewish history, religion and ethics. Daniel Stein, Interpreter won the Russian Nat…
Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Order
Representing Humanity in the Age of Enlightenment
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: Enlightenm…
The missing British conversation
Tom Lawson’s book The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania is a timely historiographical intervention. It adroitly combines postcolonial criticism of Britain’s enduring imperial vanity with a c
Emily J. Levine. Dreamland of Humanists
As an admirer of the German Jewish scholars discussed in Emily J. Levine's Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School, I was enthusiastic about the prospect of reviewing her book. Its premise is one that I share. Levine argues that the efflorescence of German Jewish humanist scholarship in fields such as philosophy and art history, beginning in the Wilhelmine era, should not be understood as a process of deracinat…
On Active Solitude
Evaluating risk in perpetrator narratives
This article considers a surge in critical enthusiasm for Holocaust-themed fictions that manipulate empathetic response to endanger and destabilise a reader used to the reiteration of various pieties about the ineffable horror of those events. It argues that interpretive prisms stimulated by the rise of ethical criticism and the postcolonial turn in Holocaust studies are powerfully suggestive but in danger of privileging the self-problematising e…
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft. Thinking in Public
Thinking in Public by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft has conflicting objectives. The author wants to contribute, without resorting to prescriptive arguments, to swirling debates about the declining fortunes of the public intellectual in an era in which this invested figure is threatened by the sequestration of the scholar-activist into the auditing culture of the corporate university. Suspicious that the friction between the intellectual and her or his p…
The Construction of an Active Reader in two Holocaust themed novels for children
Literary Representations of the Palestine/Israel Conflict After the Second Intifada
Studies literary representations of Israel and Palestine that challenge mainstream political and historical discourses Provides a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the spectrum of emergent and existing literary forms that now represents the Palestine/Israel conflict to a global audience Brings together a geographically diverse team of literary and cultural studies researchers with depth of expertise in Palestine/Israel and Middle Eastern stu…
Representing Jewish lives in the work of Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt
This article examines an underappreciated aspect of the corpus of Isaiah Berlin, his interest in biographical portraits of Jewish individuals including Moses Hess, Heinrich Heine, and Chaim Weizmann. It argues that a close study of Berlin’s biographical portraits reveals an interest in constructing a version of Jewish normality and strength of character according to the contribution those individuals have made to the Zionist movement. By contrast…
Philosophy (15 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Law (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Literature (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Theology (8 works)