The Ordeal of Civility (Masterplots II: Nonfiction Series)
At a glance:
- Author: John Murray Cuddihy
- First Published: 1974
- Type of Work: Cultural criticism/sociology
- Time of Work: The nineteenth and twentieth centuries
- Setting: Europe and the United States
- Principal Characters: Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Claude Levi-Strauss
- Genres: Criticism, Nonfiction, Sociology
- Subjects: Culture, Fratricide, parricide, or filicide, Progress, Modernization, Jews and Gentiles
Form and Content
In a fourteen-page introduction, John Cuddihy sets forth his thesis: the existence of a cultural collision between the standards of civility required by “the Protestant Etiquette” (that is, the norms governing public behavior in bourgeois Western society) and Yiddishkeit (that is, the values, feelings, and beliefs of the premodern Jewish shtetl subculture of Eastern Europe). “The secularizing Jewish intellectual, as the avant-garde of his decolonized people,” Cuddihy explains, “suffered in his own person the trauma of this culture shock, . . ....
[The entire page is 2462 words long]
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