Gabriel Josipovici

Gabriel David Josipovici (born October 8, 1940 in Nice ) is a British writer and literary scholar .

family

Gabriel Josipovici comes from an Egyptian-Jewish family: his mother was the poet and translator Sacha Rabinovitch (1910–1996). The maternal ancestors of Sacha Rabinovitch belonged to the Sephardic tribe of the Cattaui in Cairo . Her father was an Ashkenazi Russian from Odessa who had moved to Cairo. Sacha Rabinovitch and Jean Josipovici married here in 1934. The couple moved from Cairo to Aix-en-Provence , France , where Josipovici's father separated from the family in 1941.

Life

During the Vichy regime , Gabriel Josipovici and his mother escaped anti-Semitic persecution by fleeing to the French Alps . After the end of the Second World War he attended English-language schools, since 1950 in Cairo . Before the Suez crisis escalated in 1956, he emigrated to England with his mother. Here he finished his education at Cheltenham College ( Gloucestershire ). He then studied English literature at St Edmund Hall in Oxford until 1961 . From 1963 to 1998 Gabriel Josipovici taught at the University of Sussex in Brighton . He was Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford . 2007 Josipovici held at the University of London a lecture on What ever happened to Modernism?

position

In his literary and literary critical work, Gabriel Josipovici refers on the one hand to contemporary authors such as Franz Kafka , Marcel Proust and Jorge Luis Borges , but on the other hand also to classics such as Dante Alighieri , Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare . With this reference, which spans several centuries, Josipovici contradicts the narrowness of a modern or postmodern division into epochs. In Josipovici's view, the social crises have persisted since the Reformation . From this point of view, it is consistent that the author dispenses with an omniscient narrator in his works .

Publications

• The World and the Book. A Study of Modern Fiction . Macmillan, London 1971
• Writing and the Body . New Jersey Princeton University, Princeton 1982
• The Lessons of Modernism and other Essays . Macmillan, London 1987
• The Book of God. A Response to the Bible . Yale University Press , New Haven 1988
• Moo Pak . Carcanet Press 1994
  • German edition: Moo Pak . From the English by Jochen Schimmang . Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2010 ISBN 978-3-518-22457-1
• Now . Translated from the English by Gerd Haffmans . Haffmans, Zurich 2000
• Back light. A triptych after Pierre Bonnard . Translated by Susanne Luber. Haffmans, Zurich 2001
• Just joking. 2005
  • German edition: Just kidding . Translated from the English by Gerd Haffmans. Haffmans bei Zweiausendeins, Frankfurt am Main 2006 ISBN 3-86150-563-0
• Make mistakes . Translated by Katja Scholtz. Haffmans & Tolkemitt at Zweiausendeins, Berlin 2010 ISBN 978-3-942048-22-4
• What Ever Happened to Modernism? Yale University Press 2011
• Infinity: The Story of a Moment . Carcanet 2012 ISBN 9781847771667 Via Giacinto Scelsi
  • Infinity. The story of a moment . Translated by Markus Hinterhäuser . Jung & Jung, Salzburg 2012 ISBN 978-3-99027-028-8

literature

• Monika Fludernik : Echoes and Mirrorings. Gabriel Josipovici's Creative Oeuvre . Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2000, ISBN 978-3-631-36275-4

Web links

• Homepage. Gabriel Josipovici, accessed November 22, 2011 . 
• Anthony Rudolf: Obituary Sacha Rabinovitch. The Independent,accessed November 22, 2011. 
• Victor D. Sanua: The Cattaui Family (section) . Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture,accessed November 24, 2011. 
• Mark Thwaite: Interview with Gabriel Josipovici, March 14, 2006. Ready Steady Book,accessed December 19, 2011. 
• Jason Rotstein: Q&A re Infinity and other matters , April 2012, at gabrieljosipovici.org, accessed March 6, 2013

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Thomas David: We must not deny the trembling of the world . In: FAZ No. 260, November 8, 2011, p. 32.
2. ^ Luber in the VdÜ translator database , 2019