For the past century, anthologies containing German poetic texts in Yiddish translation have appeared in and beyond the former Habsburg Empire. Broadly conceiving translations as a series of ...“unfinished” published and unpublished texts that appeared before and after the Second World War, this dissertation traces the circulation in and beyond Central Europe of German-language poetry in Yiddish, and points to a relatedness between two seemingly disparate Jewish language groups that fell victim to marginalization, genocide, and displacement. In so doing, this dissertation maps contiguities “between” the languages used by Yiddish readers, writers, and translators. Furthermore, these contiguities destabilize traditional definitions of Ashkenazi Yiddish-Hebrew bi-/multilingualism within Eastern European Jewry, by noting the prolonged engagement with German and German Jewish culture across space and time. What emerges instead, is a longer, still-unfolding history of multilingual, communal, Jewish textual memory (i.e., translation). Often overlooked in the monolingual environs of North America and Israel, these texts have the ability to challenge English- and Hebrew-language hegemony that continues to render encounters with Yiddish and other languages obsolete, to instead provide resilient, multilingual, and diasporic Jewish cultural models.
The National Endowment for the Arts has long been a source of debate, sparking controversy over federally funding the arts. This report investigates justifications for both sides of this dispute, ...including local insight into the impact of federally funded art, utilizing reports, statistics, official documents, and personal interviews. The findings of this report will be a comprehensive tool in advocating for federally funded art now and in the future.
Traditional golem narratives re-interpret the theological and mystical narratives of creation—that have always left a space for the feminine presence—as patriarchal stories about masculine power in ...which exclusively male creators craft and ultimately destroy male golems. However, at the end of the twentieth century, Cynthia Ozick and Marge Piercy reclaimed these mystical tales and their feminine potential by bestowing the power to create and destroy on women. Rather than continue weaving the centuries-old tale of a man—historically Rabbi Judah Loew—who creates a male golem—usually a mute, clay being—Ozick, in The Puttermesser Papers, crafts the story of Ruth Puttermesser and her overtly, unapologetically female golem, Xanthippe. Similarly, in the novel He, She and It, Marge Piercy presents the cyborg-golem—Yod—whose collaborative creation includes the presence of Malkah, a Jewish woman. Linking the mystical golem tale to traditional creation stories and a post-Holocaust and even posthuman world, these writers present women who shape golems (and golem stories) and thereby cement their roles in Jewish history and futurity. Ultimately, both authors allow readers to inherit worlds where ontological hierarchies evaporate, and we are left with characters—particularly golems—that map ways of eliding boundaries of time, gender, and being.
This dissertation introduces the concept of biological imagination, a new analytic framework for Jewish literary and cultural production in the United States. The Biological Imagination in ...Twentieth-Century Jewish American Culture argues that from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, Jewish American authors across genres repeatedly turn to themes and forms of biology—ranging from evolution to racial typology, to genetics—in order to locate Jewish inheritance in the body. While biological knowledge itself has been approached with understandable wariness since the Holocaust, due to its association with the race science that fueled the Nazi genocide, the dissertation illustrates that both in spite of, and because of, Jews’ vexed historical relationship to biology, Jewish American authors continue to infuse their works with biological knowledge after the historical chasm of 1945. That Jewish literary and cultural production should continue to incorporate, or obsess over, biological theories of inheritance, complicates the historical narrative of Jews in the United States as well as the way that Jewish American literature can be understood within American ethnic literature today.The biological imagination necessitates reexamination of the literary and cultural circulation of many of Jewish American culture’s central concerns, including language, immigration and assimilation, race and ethnicity, and gender and sexuality. Not only does biological knowledge enrapture fictional characters, but biological models of inheritance also deeply structure works’ narrative and poetic forms. Furthermore, this cultural phenomenon extends beyond literature, from photography in the 1910s, to contemporary television series. The dissertation assembles sources in English and in Yiddish, from the 1890s to the present, including The Rise of David Levinsky by Abraham Cahan, The Promised Land by Mary Antin, The Family Carnovsky by Israel Joshua Singer, Focus by Arthur Miller, Gentleman’s Agreement by Laura Z. Hobson, A Few Words in the Mother Tongue by Irena Klepfisz, Sources by Adrienne Rich, and Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth, as well as the composite photography of Francis Galton and the Amazon series Transparent. More often evoking mystery than certainty, the biological imagination at once responds to and highlights the elusiveness of Jewish inheritance for Jewish authors in the United States.
In his five-year-long world literature lecture series, running from 1989 to 1994, the Chinese diasporic writer-painter Mu Xin (1927-2011) provided a puzzling advice for the group of emerging Chinese ...artists living in New York: “Art is to sacrifice.” Reading this advice in tandem with other comments on “sacrifice” that Mu Xin provided throughout the lecture series, this study uses the concept of “art is to sacrifice one’s death” to examine the intricate relationship between aesthetics and ethics in Mu Xin’s project of art. The question of diasporic positionality is inherent in the relationship between aesthetic and ethical discourses, since the two discourses themselves were born in a Western tradition that was once foreign to Mu Xin. Examining his life together with his works in different medium, I trace the intellectual genealogy of his works to the legacy of Lu Xun and Lin Fengmian’s debate in the late 1920s. Then, I examine how Mu Xin reinvented their aesthetic-cum-ethical project to shape his role as an artist in the world. Finally, through comparing him to a similar Chinese diasporic artist Gao Xingjian, I put the artistic image that Mu Xin established for himself in relation to the political position that he inhabited as a diasporic artist working across cultural boundaries. I argue that Mu Xin not only vigorously forwarded an ethical project in pursuit of humanness with his advice on art but also envisioned such humanness to be a mediative process of social activity instead of any essential state of being or sentimentality in a singular mind. Through such an artistic project, Mu Xin managed to participate in reforming the static boundaries of culture and nation-state, such that he carried out a political project though fictional means, making the world more adaptive to individuals living within it.
The focus of this thesis is an analysis of post-Holocaust Jewish-American literature with a specific emphasis on texts set in Europe. In particular, I examine how Jewish-American authors who lived in ...the United States during the Holocaust address issues of trauma and survivor’s guilt through fiction. Informed especially by Theodor Adorno and Elie Wiesel, I examine the ethics of fictionalizing the Holocaust. Furthermore, this thesis considers both trauma theory and the psychology of grief to investigate the ways in which the Jewish-American community at large responded to the cultural destruction perpetrated by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Chapter One analyzes the use of allegory in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Slave, a novel set in seventeenth-century Poland. In writing The Slave, Bashevis Singer approaches issues of guilt and the destruction of cultural and religious spaces, as well as the loss of community, in such a way as to give specific voice to the Jewish American community. In Chapter Two, I focus on Cynthia Ozick’s short story “The Shawl,” which is a brief but powerful fictional Holocaust narrative. Ozick’s text examines the ways in which the Holocaust destroys the bonds of family and community, and it grapples with the question of responsibility and blame felt by those who were not directly affected by the Holocaust itself.
This dissertation explores the use of the golem, the Jewish mythical creature, by authors to challenge monolithic conceptions of Jewish masculinity. I argue that by acknowledging the mutual ...interdependencies between the creator and the created, writers can gesture to the radical potential of the golem. In chapter one, I show how the treatments of the golem in Elie Wiesel’s and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s respective golem novels, The Golem: The Story of a Legend, and The Golem, precipitate its use in later stories. I also demonstrate how Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay interrogates masculinity by taking some of the questions concerning the creator’s relation to their art raised by Wiesel and Singer to their logical ends. In chapter two, I examine the representations of Jewish and black masculinities and the golem in James Sturm’s graphic novel, The Golem’s Mighty Swing . Chapter three demonstrates how Ruth Puttermesser of Cynthia Ozick’s The Puttermesser Papers can perform masculinity by creating a golem. Finally, in chapter four I explore how Thane Rosenbaum with his novel The Golems of Gotham, and Pete Hamill with Snow in August , negotiate cultural rupture and loss via their golems. I posit that all of these stories attest to the strong ties between creator and created in order to reimagine creation and power inside and outside Judaism.
The Jewish-Italian writer Primo Levi (1919-1987) is one of the most significant European authors of the twentieth century. The double nature of his writing – based on both his tragic experience as a ...prisoner in Auschwitz and his career as professional chemist – has been internationally recognized as a truthful image of our recent past, in its tangle of horror and progress, technology and suffering. In this dissertation, I investigate the mysterious presence of animal representations and references to animality in Levi’s books in order to achieve a better comprehension of what aesthetic and ethical questions he left us. Relatively unexamined by scholars, the complex and extensive animal imagery Levi employed in his literary works offers first and foremost an insight into his experience at Auschwitz and the function of testimony. Equally importantly, it provides an original perspective on both the cultural legacy of the twentieth century and the contemporary debate on post-humanism and human-animal relationships. My research explores Levi’s body of work on the issues of suffering, techne, and creation respectively, and reveals how his animal imagery possesses first of all an unquestionable ethical origin (suffering). This initial ethical intuition goes then through a deep and wide investigation of the material, transformative, act of writing, and his animal representations become part of a project in which literary hybridization plays a major role (techne). Finally, as part of this creative project, Levi’s animal imagery counterbalances the horror produced by what he calls a “controcreazione” countercreation, i.e. Auschwitz, and proposes a less anthropocentric understanding of our presence in the universe (creation). This dissertation concludes noticing how the animal representations displayed by Levi transform his whole oeuvre into a testimony about the possible limitrophy between human and non-human animals.
This dissertation examines how twentieth-century Jewish American writers conceive of the world and of their place, as Jews, in its complex of audiences. My research maps the ways in which Jewish ...American writers traversed political and linguistic boundaries to join transnational networks: the anthologies and canons of world literature, international modernisms, and global literary economies. During the twentieth century, the American literary market began to reflect the new realities of globalization, through the success of translated best sellers, the rise in popularity of immigrant literatures, and the growing prominence of modernist movements. This dissertation traces how four Jewish American writers – Sholem Asch, Jacob Glatstein, and Isaac Bashevis Singer in Yiddish and Saul Bellow in English – negotiated the intertwined and evolving legacies of these new forms of world literature from the 1930s to the 1970s. The first two chapters of the dissertation examine the status of Yiddish literature on the world stage during the interwar period, focusing on Sholem Asch and Jacob Glatstein as two opposing models of world-writing. Asch was a bestselling novelist in Yiddish and English and a believer in the reconciliation of Christian and Jewish traditions through world literature and translation. Glatstein proposed an opposite project: rejecting translation altogether, he hoped for an alternative, modernist form of world literature that valued the very untranslatability of Yiddish literature. The third and fourth chapters focus on two postwar models, the Nobel Prize winners Isaac Bashevis Singer and Saul Bellow. In the shadow of the Holocaust, Bashevis Singer saw the translation of his writing from Yiddish into English as a way to preserve and universalize a lost Eastern European civilization, especially as it was reflected in the pseudo-autobiographical accounts he produced of his own past. Bellow, an heir to the traditions of Yiddish literature but at home in English as an American novelist, also saw Jewishness as an integral yet undetermined part of his personal, and paradoxically universal, imaginative project. Both postwar authors harbored universal ambitions to be accepted in world literature, but their works were also haunted by the unassimilable traumas of the Holocaust and the inevitable compromises of transcultural exchange. The models gathered in this project enable an outline of the strategies and possibilities of world literature during the twentieth century while also illustrating the limitations of the very idea of world literature. However, despite the global circulation of their work and despite their having written extensively on the questions of translation and audience, the writers considered in this project have rarely been studied in conjunction with the concept of world literature. While there has been recent interest among scholars in a transnational American Literature and a renewed focus on world literature in Comparative Literature, there is still a lack of scholarship on how writers from ethnic enclaves confront the global dimensions of the literary marketplace. By analyzing how Jewish American writing can act as a supplement to transnational literary systems, I seek to challenge normative conceptions of world literature. Jewish American writing comprises a collection of texts that strive for success on the global market and seek recognition as universal literary objects; but these texts simultaneously remain untranslatable, unhinge networks, and can be read against their own global ambitions. This project also attempts to expand contemporary scholarship on Jewish writing beyond a focus on the marginal status of Jewish literatures. Rather than locate Jewish writing on the peripheries of world literature, this dissertation tracks the undecidability of modern Jewish writing, the complex ways in which modern Jewish writing, in multiple languages, translated and untranslated, negotiates its inevitable global contexts.
