Jewish American Writing and World Literature

Jewish American Writing and World Literature PDF Author: Saul Noam Zaritt
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198863713
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
This book explores how Jewish American writers like Sholem Asch, Jacob Glatstein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anna Margolin, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley think of themselves as world writers, and the successes and failures that come with this role.

Jewish American Writing and World Literature

Jewish American Writing and World Literature PDF Author: Saul Noam Zaritt
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198863713
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
This book explores how Jewish American writers like Sholem Asch, Jacob Glatstein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anna Margolin, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley think of themselves as world writers, and the successes and failures that come with this role.

Jewish American Writing and World Literature

Jewish American Writing and World Literature PDF Author: Saul Noam Zaritt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192609149
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody studies Jewish American writers' relationships with the idea of world literature. Writers such as Sholem Asch, Jacob Glatstein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anna Margolin, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley all responded to a demand to write beyond local Jewish and American audiences and toward the world, as a global market and as a transnational ideal. Beyond fame and global circulation, world literature holds up the promise of legibility, in which a threatened origin becomes the site for redemptive literary creativity. But this promise inevitably remains unfulfilled, as writers struggle to balance potential universal achievements with untranslatable realities, rendering impossible any complete arrival in the US and in the world. The work examined in this study was deeply informed by an intimate connection to Yiddish, a Jewish vernacular with its own global network and institutional ambitions. Jewish American Writing and World Literature tracks the attempts and failures, through translation, to find a home for Jewish vernacularity in the institution of world literature. The exploration of the translational uncertainty of Jewish American writing joins postcolonial critiques of US and world literature and challenges Eurocentric and Anglo-American paradigms of literary study. In bringing into conversation the fields of Yiddish studies, American Studies, and world literature theory, Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody proposes a new approach to the study of modern Jewish literatures and their implication within global empires of culture.

Jewish American Literature since 1945

Jewish American Literature since 1945 PDF Author: Stephen Wade
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136596496
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Jewish American writing is an exciting and controversial genre within post-war literature. Jewish American Literature since 1945 offers a student guide to the major writers, their key works, and their cultural and philosophical backgrounds. The theoretical underpinnings of the literature--including the postmodern, the masternarrative and metafiction--are also introduced in an accessible form. The themes, issues and philosophies of key writers such as Saul Bellow, Erica Jong, Arthur Miller, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer are inter-related, and wider literary and historical topics are explained.

American Hebrew Literature

American Hebrew Literature PDF Author: Michael Weingrad
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815632511
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Over the last one hundred years, the story of Jews in the United States has been, by and large, one of successful and enthusiastic Americanization. Hundreds of thousands of Jews began the twentieth century as new arrivals in a foreign land yet soon became shapers and definers of American culture itself. One of the clearest expressions of this transformation has been the quick linguistic march of immigrant Jews and their children from Yiddish to English. In this book, Michael Weingrad presents a counter history of American Jewish culture, one that tells the story of literature written by a group whose core identity was neither American nor Jewish American. These writers were ardently and nationalistically Jewish and, despite adopting a new country, their linguistic and cultural allegiance was to the Hebrew language. Producing poetry, short fiction, novels, essays, and journals, these writers sought to express a Jewish cultural nationalism through literature. Weingrad explores Hebrew literature in the United States from the emergence of a group of writers connected with the Hebraist movement in the early twentieth century to the present. Radically expanding and challenging our conceptions of American and Jewish identities in literature, the author offers wide-ranging cultural analyses and thoughtful readings of key works. American Hebrew Literature restores a lost piece of the canvas of Hebrew literature and Jewish culture in the twentieth century and invites readers to reimagine Jewish American writers of our own time.

Exiles on Main Street

Exiles on Main Street PDF Author: Julian Levinson
Publisher: Jewish Literature and Culture
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
How have Jews reshaped their identities as Jews in the face of the radical newness called America? Julian Levinson explores the ways in which exposure to American literary culture—in particular the visionary tradition identified with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman—led American Jewish writers to a new understanding of themselves as Jews. Discussing the lives and work of writers such as Emma Lazarus, Mary Antin, Ludwig Lewisohn, Waldo Frank, Anzia Yezierska, I. J. Schwartz, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe, Levinson concludes that their interaction with American culture led them to improvise new and meaningful ways of being Jewish. In contrast to the often expressed view that the diaspora experience leads to assimilation, Exiles on Main Street traces an arc of return to Jewish identification and describes a vital and creative Jewish American literary culture.

The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature

The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature PDF Author: Hana Wirth-Nesher
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316395340
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1254

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Book Description
This History offers an unparalleled examination of all aspects of Jewish American literature. Jewish writing has played a central role in the formation of the national literature of the United States, from the Hebraic sources of the Puritan imagination to narratives of immigration and acculturation. This body of writing has also enriched global Jewish literature in its engagement with Jewish history and Jewish multilingual culture. Written by a host of leading scholars, The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature offers an array of approaches that contribute to current debates about ethnic writing, minority discourse, transnational literature, gender studies, and multilingualism. This History takes a fresh look at celebrated authors, introduces new voices, locates Jewish American literature on the map of American ethnicity as well as the spaces of exile and diaspora, and stretches the boundaries of American literature beyond the Americas and the West.

Who We Are

Who We Are PDF Author: Derek Rubin
Publisher: Schocken
ISBN: 0307493113
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
This unprecedented collection brings together the major Jewish American writers of the past fifty years as they examine issues of identity and how they’ve made their work respond. E.L. Doctorow questions the very notion of the Jewish American writer, insisting that all great writing is secular and universal. Allegra Goodman embraces the categorization, arguing that it immediately binds her to her readers. Dara Horn, among the youngest of these writers, describes the tendency of Jewish writers to focus on anti-Semitism and advocates a more creative and positive way of telling the Jewish story. Thane Rosenbaum explains that as a child of Holocaust survivors, he was driven to write in an attempt to reimagine the tragic endings in Jewish history. Here are the stories of how these writers became who they are: Saul Bellow on his adolescence in Chicago, Grace Paley on her early love of Romantic poetry, Chaim Potok on being transformed by the work of Evelyn Waugh. Here, too, are Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Erica Jong, Jonathon Rosen, Tova Mirvis, Pearl Abraham, Alan Lelchuk, Rebecca Goldstein, Nessa Rapoport, and many more. Spanning three generations of Jewish writing in America, these essays — by turns nostalgic, comic, moving, and deeply provocative- constitute an invaluable investigation into the thinking and the work of some of America’s most important writers.

Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists

Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists PDF Author: Joel Shatzky
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313033293
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 537

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Book Description
Since World War II, Jewish-American novelists have significantly contributed to the world of literature. This reference book includes alphabetically arranged entries for more than 75 Jewish-American novelists whose major works were largely written after World War II. Included are entries for both well-known and relatively obscure novelists, many of whom are just becoming established as significant literary figures. While the volume profiles major canonical figures such as Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and Bernard Malamud, it also aims to be more inclusive than other works on contemporary Jewish-American writers. Thus there are entries for gay and lesbian novelists such as Lev Raphael and Judith Katz, whose works challenge the more orthodox definition of Jewish religious and cultural traditions; Art Speigelman, whose controversial ^IMaus^R established a new genre by combining elements of the comic book and the conventional novel; and newcomers such as Steve Stern and Max Apple, who have become more prominent within the last decade. Each entry includes a brief biography, a discussion of major works and themes, an overview of the novelist's critical reception, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. A thoughtful introduction summarizes Jewish-American fiction after World War II, and a selected, general bibliography lists additional sources of information. Since World War II, Jewish-American novelists have made numerous significant contributions to contemporary literature. Authors of earlier generations would frequently write about the troubles and successes of Jewish immigrants to America, and their works would reflect the world of European Jewish culture. But like other immigrant groups, Jewish-Americans have become increasingly assimilated into mainstream American culture. Many feel the loss of their heritage and long for something to replace the lost values of the old world. This reference book includes alphabetically arranged entries for more than 75 Jewish-American novelists whose major works were largely written after World War II. Included are entries for both well-known and relatively obscure novelists, many of whom are just becoming established as significant literary figures. While the volume profiles major canonical figures such as Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and Bernard Malamud, it also aims to be more inclusive than other works on contemporary Jewish-American writers. Thus there are entries for gay and lesbian novelists such as Lev Raphael and Judith Katz, whose works challenge the more orthodox definitions of Jewish religious and cultural traditions; Art Speigelman, whose controversial ^IMaus^R established a new genre by combining elements of the comic book and the conventional novel; and newcomers such as Steve Stern and Max Apple, who have become more prominent within the last decade. Each entry includes a brief biography, a discussion of major works and themes, an overview of the novelist's critical reception, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. A thoughtful introduction summarizes Jewish-American fiction after World War II, and a selected, general bibliography lists additional sources for information.

The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature

The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature PDF Author: Benjamin Schreier
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812297563
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Benjamin Schreier argues that Jewish American literature's dominant cliché of "breakthrough"—that is, the irruption into the heart of the American cultural scene during the 1950s of Jewish American writers like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley—must also be seen as the critically originary moment of Jewish American literary study. According to Schreier, this is the primal scene of the Jewish American literary field, the point that the field cannot avoid repeating and replaying in instantiating itself as the more or less formalized academic study of Jewish American literature. More than sixty years later, the field's legibility, the very condition of its possibility, remains overwhelmingly grounded in a reliance on this single ethnological narrative. In a polemic against what he sees as the unexamined foundations and stagnant state of the field, Schreier interrogates a series of professionally powerful assumptions about Jewish American literary history—how they came into being and how they hardened into cliché. He offers a critical genealogy of breakthrough and other narratives through which Jewish Studies has asserted its compelling self-evidence, not simply under the banner of the historical realities Jewish Studies claims to represent but more fundamentally for the intellectual and institutional structures through which it produces these representations. He shows how a historicist scholarly narrative quickly consolidated and became hegemonic, in part because of its double articulation of a particular American subject and of a transnational historiography that categorically identified that subject as Jewish. The ethnological grounding of the Jewish American literary field is no longer tenable, Schreier asserts, in an argument with broad implications for the reconceptualization of Jewish and other identity-based ethnic studies.

Jewish American Literature

Jewish American Literature PDF Author: Jules Chametzky
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393048094
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1264

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Book Description
A collection of Jewish-American literature written by various authors between 1656 and 1990.