Dec 2, 2008

The Ordeal of Civility | The Ordeal of Civility

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]

The Ordeal of Civility | The Ordeal of Civility

At a glance:

Form and Content

Join eNotes