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Knapp.SacredSongsPopularPricesAchibar.pptxKyle Achaibar Sacred Songs Popular Prices Jeffrey Knapp
The Lecturer’s quiz
1.) How do the concepts assimilation and secularization compare and contrast?
2.) According to Jeffrey Knapp, how can both terms be identified within The Jazz Singer?
The need to know
Understand how Knapp compares secularization and religion.
Understand how secularization defines religion, and effect society.
Observe the different ways The Jazz Singer supports Knapp's claims and observations.
Learn and apply the terms Knapp introduces in his argument.
The jazz singer
Assimilation
“…Jakie renounces his Jewishness in order to assimilate; but this attempt at total integration fails. In the end, as the two-part conclusion to the film dramatizes, Jakie opts for Jewishness and assimilation; we see him in cantorial and blackface performances, but never again as the neatly integrated Jack Robin” (Knapp, 317).
”So alive is The Jazz Singer to the possibility of harmonizing the Jewish Jakie with the American Jakie, rather than suppressing one identity for the other, that the film not only juxtaposes the cantor with the entertainer in its final two scenes but also treats the entertainer as a kind of cantor throughout” (Knapp, 318).
Knapp and Secularization
“By secularization I mean the process not just of displacing religion but of transforming it to secular use” (Knapp, 319).
“The movie’s exclusive focus on religion as Judaism cuts two ways, however. While it helps The Jazz Singer represent entertainment as the universal to religion’s particular, it also highlights the particularity of Judaism as a religion” (Knapp, 321).
The big picture
”…secularization is parasitical on religion, however, it can never escape the prospect of reversibility; the very idea of secularization as religion appropriated means that no unbreachable wall can be built between the two” (Knapp, 335).
Work Cited
Knapp, Jeffrey. “‘Sacred Songs Popular Prices’: Secularization in The Jazz Singer.” Critical Inquiry , vol. 34, no. 2, 2008, pp. 313–334.
