The ontology of Yentl: Umberto Eco, semiosis, mimesis, closets and existence, and how to read “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy”
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Joel West
Abstract
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” (Singer, I. B. 1962. Yentl the yeshiva boy. Commentary Magazine. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/yentl-the-yeshiva-boy-a-story/ (accessed 25 March 2017).) needs to be read in the light of traditional Jewish sources. The question is, how does it stand up to modern hypotheses of gender construction? Yentl was originally published in Yiddish and was translated to English in the latter half of the twentieth century. We will see that the context within which to understand the story properly is encoded in the story itself, as Umberto Eco explains in his The Role of the Reader and The Limits of Interpretation. We will see how the concept of a person’s gender, as a construction by social norms, is viewed within mainstream Jewish thought. Some textual issues and contemporary ideas of gender are applied to the story. Finally, the feature film Yentl (Streisand, B. (dir.). 1983. Yentl [film]. Los Angeles: United Artists Films.) is also compared the short story on which it was based as an example of translation and re-interpretation.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- L’énonciation et l’avènement de Gaston Lagaffe
- Stereotyping in representing the “Chinese Dream” in news reports by CNN and BBC
- Transcoding identity: Assemblages between man and machine beyond the cyborg archetype – a semiotic route
- Semiotic interpretation of a city soundscape
- “Presentation” and “representation” of contents as principles of media convergence: A model of rhetorical narrativity of interactive multimedia design in mass communication with a case study of the digital edition of the New York Times
- “Authentically Disney, distinctly Chinese” and faintly American: The emotional branding of Disneyland in Shanghai
- Branding and communities: The normative dimension
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- “Atmos-fear”: A psycho-semiotic analysis of messages in New York everyday life
- Semiotic space invasion: The case of Donald Trump’s US presidential campaign
- The ontology of Yentl: Umberto Eco, semiosis, mimesis, closets and existence, and how to read “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy”
- The semiotics of common sense: Patterns of meaning-sharing in the semiosphere
- Sémiotique de la /lumière/ et de l’/obscurité/ de L’Ile de la fée d’Edgar Poe, et Pierre et Jean de Guy de Maupassant, à La Route d’Altamont de Gabrielle Roy, et L’Assassinat de la Via Belpoggio d’Italo Svevo
- A Lonerganian-Bakhtinian novelization of inculturation
