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From Image to Word: Primitivist Visuality in Der Nister’s Stories

Sun, December 16, 4:15 to 5:45pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Harborview 3 Ballroom

Abstract

The German-Jewish social critic and art historian Carl Einstein (1885-1940) claimed that Cubist abstraction was transferable from art to literature. But he did not say how. In this paper I will draw out Einstein’s framework for how this might have been done and then analyze an example of literary primitivism by his contemporary, the Yiddish writer Der Nister (Pinkhes Kahanovitsh; 1884-1950). The first part of my paper will focus on Einstein’s theories of abstraction as articulated in his key contribution to modernist primitivism, the treatise Negro Sculpture of 1914. Considered the first art historical treatment of African sculpture in Western scholarship, the book is actually a manifesto on primitivist aesthetics and articulates the principles – based on visuality, but divorced from actual representation – of primitivist abstraction. I contend that it is these principles that Einstein claimed are transferable from image to text; I argue further that it is Der Nister who came closest to fulfilling the promise of literary abstraction, closer even than Einstein in his own literary works. I will briefly explore the possibility of a biographical intersection of the two figures before turning to examples of literary abstraction in Der Nister’s story collections GEDAKHT (1922-23) and FUN MAYNE GITER (1929).

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