Naomi Lebowitz

Naomi Gordon Lebowitz (born February 6, 1932) is a literary philosopher, author, critic, and scholar of American, English, Scandinavian, and continental European literature, as well as a translator of Danish fiction.

Her seven book-length critical studies of authors and thinkers have focused on the difficulties of spiritual and religious passion in the face of modern belief systems.

Lebowitz's acclaimed translation of the Nobel-Prize winning Danish author Henrik Pontoppidan's 1917 novel Lykke-Per (English: Lucky Per) was published in 2010.

[3] Her father served Shaare Emeth, one of the leading Reform congregations in the United States, guiding it through the Great Depression, World War II, and a move from St. Louis's Central West End to the suburb of University City.

[6] Lebowitz joined the faculties of the Washington University English and Comparative Literature Departments in 1962, and was honored by the student body for excellence in teaching in 1968.

[7] Lebowitz rarely taught the same books more than once and reveled in designing creative syllabi that juxtaposed writers from different traditions in dialogues to be mediated by her student readers.

A typical, one-of-a-kind graduate seminar, offered in 1976, brought together six authors writing in four languages under the title "James's Balzac, Conrad's Flaubert, and Kafka's Svevo.

"[8] Representative of appreciative students over the years was her dissertation advisee Brian Walter, who noted in 2012 that Lebowitz actually designed two new courses each semester — which covered "the full historical, philosophical and cross-cultural foundations of modern narrative.

[9] In 1989, Professor Lebowitz was named Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Scholar in the Humanities by Washington University, a position she held until her retirement 11 years later.

[12] Both Naomi and Albert Lebowitz (who published a short-story collection, two novels and a study entitled "The Legal Mind and the Presidency") associated professionally and socially with a prominent Washington University literary circle.

The two women "clearly enjoyed exchanging views on art, literature and politics," shared a resistance to deconstructionist literary theory, and established an extended correspondence that lasted for years.

In the first thorough English-language study of Ettore Schmitz, (pen name, Italo Svevo), Lebowitz also produced a sweeping consideration of an era in European literature.

She finds instead that "[Svevo] is open on all sides to every cultural influence that shaped the modern novel—to the self-irony of Austria's literary Jew and to his psychoanalysis; to the Slavic preference for the insulted and the injured; to the cramped dreams of France's post-Napoleonic heroes doomed to live out bourgeois monarchies; to pathologists dissecting the old morality, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Ibsen; to a new Italian fiction waiting for wider recognition .

In World Literature Today, Rosetta d. Piclardi notes that Lebowitz compares Svevo with Montaigne because for both authors "a healthy and creative amateurism .

"[23] Her engagement with Kierkegaard's thought led Lebowitz to write about his "use of literary devices to break through speculative philosophy and over-ambitious ethical claims.

"[1] While Kierkegaard: A Life of Allegory deepened Lebowitz's embrace of Scandinavian literature and spiritual themes, it received mixed reviews, perhaps because it defied conventions by applying her particular form of reader-response literary criticism to an author categorized as a philosopher.

"There is no doubt Lebowitz has come up with an extremely original approach to Kierkegaard, but in her desire to reflect his authorship it has perhaps been a serious mistake to attempt to write in his style," asserted Julia Watkin.

[24] Mark C. Taylor appreciated Lebowitz's "understanding of the nature of the life that is transcribed in the body of the text," but criticized her for not taking deconstructionist theory into account.

Readers of Kierkegaard must decide, Lebowitz writes, "whether the perpetual transition from psychological sickness to spiritual health, repeatedly enacted, is finally a persuasive reality for others.

"[27] James R. Scrimgeour also praises Lebowitz's success in showing that Ibsen is "not merely a social dramatist but a citizen of the 'Great World,' a human being whose 'demands for spiritual expansion' are 'difficult and merciless.'

"[28] Lebowitz collaborated with her twin sister, independent scholar Ruth (Gordon) Newton, to produce a literary study focused on authors who, they argued, refused to yield their "moral passion" to social and historical conventions.

The Impossible Romance explicates novels by Charles Dickens, Alessandro Manzoni, Emile Zola, and Henry James to demonstrate that these novelists create powerful narratives by exploiting "the dramatic autonomy and collision of the historical and spiritual spheres."

He noted the authors' combination of two important theoretical arguments, the philosophical and the formal, lauding a "sensitivity bordering on Johnsonian openness in their assessment of [the] value of human experience—as reflected in the biographies of writers as a key to understanding some of the most prized examples of the nineteenth-century novel in Europe and America.

"[31] In her last critical book before she turned her primary efforts to translation, Lebowitz made a case against the theoretical emphases, particularly deconstructionist theory and the narrow professionalism prevailing in literary studies during the 1980s.

"[32] Scholar Richard Hibbitt writes that Lebowitz's study "proposes that certain writers benefit from the ability to conceive art with what she describes as an anti-professional disposition.