Although the period leading up to the Nazi genocide of Europe's Jews has been well recorded, few sources convey the incremental effect of specific decrees aimed to dehumanize the Jews who were caught in Hitler's net, and how their everyday lives were transformed. These letters, written by Malvina Fischer to her daughter Mimi Weisz, have been translated and edited by her granddaughter Edith Kurzweil. They convey with vivid immediacy the fears and premonitions, the ghettoization and escape a...

This book traces the intellectual history of the interaction between feminists and Freudian thought, charting the essence of psychoanalytic theories through the years to show specific notions were adapted, readapted, and discarded by successive generations of feminists.

Every country unconsciously creates the psychoanalysis it needs, says Edith Kurzweil. Freudians everywhere, even the most orthodox, are influenced by national traditions, interests, beliefs, and institutions. In this original and stimulating book, Kurzweil traces the ways in which psychoanalysis has evolved in Austria, England, France, Germany, and the United States.The author explains how psychoanalysis took root in each country, outlines the history of various psychoanalytic inst...

First published in 1984, Cultural Analysis is a systematic examination of the theories of culture contained in the writings of four contemporary social theorists: Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas.This study of their work clarifies their contributions to the analysis of culture and shows the converging assumptions that the authors believe are laying the foundation for a new approach to the study of culture. The focus is specifically on cul...

First published in 1983, Writers and Politics: A Partisan Review Reader, edited by Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips, captures the intersection of literature and politics as explored in Partisan Review since the late 1930s. This anthology reflects the journal’s commitment to non-doctrinaire, nonconformist, and open-minded perspectives, offering a rich collection of essays that examine the dynamic relationship between political ideologies and literary expression....

This is a personal history of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of Edith Kurzweil, author, teacher, editor of Partisan Review, and a recent recipient of the National Medal of Humanities. The book opens with Kurzweil early adolescence in Vienna during the Nazi takeover. It ends with the author finding herself in the new century. In between, she kept moving on and interrogating the world around her. The reader follows Kurzweil on her perilous journey, at the age of fourteen, to ...

Structuralism began in linguistics and was enlarged by Claude Levi-Strauss into a new way of thinking that views our world as consisting of relationships between structures we create rather than of objective realities. The Age of Structuralism examines the work of seven writers who either expanded upon or reacted against Levi-Strauss.In a panoramic overview of the origins of deconstructionism and its critics, Edith Kurzweil offers a lucid and penetrating portrait of the mo...