The New Jewish American Literary Studies

by Victoria Aarons (Editor)

Overview

The opening decades of the twenty-first century are distinguished by a newly framed and regenerated outlook of Jewish American literary studies. This volume introduces readers to the new perspectives, new approaches, and widening of interpretive possibilities in Jewish American literature accompanied by the changes of the new millennium. Now that we are over a decade into a new century, the field of Jewish American literary studies has begun to reshape itself in response to a 'new diaspora', a newly defined sense not only of Jewish American literature, but of America, an expansion of new genres, new voices, and new platforms of expression. This book re-evaluates questions of race, feminism, gender, sexuality, orthodoxy, assimilation, identity politics, and historical alienation that shape Jewish American literary studies. Several chapters show the influence of other cultures on the field such as Iranian-American-Jewish writing, Israeli-American, and Latin American literary expression, as well as the impact of Russian emigres.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781108619370
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	04/18/2019
Series:	Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Victoria Aarons is author of A Measure of Memory (1996) and What Happened to Abraham (2005), both recipients of the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Book, and co-author with Alan L. Berger of Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory (2017). She is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow (Cambridge, 2017) and Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction (2016), and the co-editor of The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction (2015), Bernard Malamud: A Centennial Tribute (2016), and the forthcoming volume New Directions in Jewish American and Holocaust Literature: Reading and Teaching. Aarons is a judge of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, a prize awarded each year to a rising American Jewish writer of fiction. She has published well over seventy scholarly articles and is on the editorial board of Philip Roth Studies, Studies in American Jewish Literature, and Women in Judaism.

Table of Contents

Introduction: toward a New Jewish American literary studies Victoria Aarons; Part I. Concepts: 1. 'Jewish American' or 'American Jewish': the hybrid in literary studies Berel Lang; 2. A new diaspora: Jewish American writers from across the globe Victoria Aarons; 3. Wrestling with politics: Jewish American writing from left to right (and back again) Michael Staub; 4. Israel and America in Jewish American writing Eli Lederhendler; 5. Jewish American writing and race Dean Franco; 6. Gender and feminism in contemporary Jewish American writing Jessica Lang; Part II. Contexts: 7. Rethinking postwar Jewish American writers Timothy Parrish; 8. The insistence of psychoanalysis in contemporary Jewish American fiction Willis Salomon; 9. Reimagining the past, imagining the future: myth, history, and mystery in contemporary Jewish American fiction David Brauner; 10. Women's voices: the assimilated subject and the persistence of marginalisation Catherine Morley; 11. A guide for the heretic: charting the journey off the path of tradition Avinoam Patt; Part III. 'New' Forms and Histories: 12. Rethinking literary and ethical response to the Holocaust: reading 'with Hitler in New York' Gary Weissman; 13. Jews in contemporary cinema and television Nathan Abrams; 14. Story into memoir, memoir into story: Iranian-Jewish-American writing Judie Newman; 15. Jewish-Latin American literature Darrell B. Lockhart; 16. Jewish American literary studies abroad Gustavo Sánchez Canales.