Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

An ideological and political awareness, though deliberately disguised or concealed in most of Plath's imaginative work, had been part of her consciousness since childhood. This awareness was disguised primarily because it was initially overshadowed by another ideology with which it competed, a modernist aesthetic that separated art from politics and celebrated the individual vision of the artist. 1. Individualism and the 'peanut crunching crowd' Plath's strong faith in individualism and the independence of art from society was cultivated by her upbringing, and reinforced by her reading. Three significant influences on Plath's version of individualism are Nietzsche, Ortega, and...

The Ideological Apprenticeship of Sylvia Plath

A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.
---Philip Roth

An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew---Sylvia Plath