Deepens and enriches our understanding of the Jewish literary tradition and the implications of the Shoah. Challenging the notion that Jewish American and Holocaust literature have exhausted their limits, this volume reexamines these closely linked traditions in light of recent postmodern theory. Composed against the tumultuous background of great cultural transition and unprecedented state-sponsored systematic murder, Jewish American and Holocaust literature both address the concerns of postmodern human existence in extremis. In addition to exploring how various mythic and literary themes are deconstructed in the lurid light of Auschwitz, this book provides critical reassessments of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth, as well as contemporary Jewish American writers who are extending this vibrant tradition into the new millennium. These essays deepen and enrich our understanding of the Jewish literary tradition and the implications of the Shoah.

Text: English, Yiddish (translation)

In drama and in musical comedy, in popular song and in symphonic music, in movies and in literature, Jews have contributed to American culture in the 20th century to a degree out of all proportion to their numbers. But does this vast creative output coalesce into something identifiable as an American Jewish culture? Stephen J. Whitfield answers this question with a resounding "yes!" Whitfield focuses on areas where the specifically Jewish contribution has been little explored. He surveys such fields as popular music, musical theater, and drama, focusing on key figures from Jerome Kern and the Gershwins to Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins; Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland to Irving Berlin and Bob Dylan; Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman to David Mamet and Wendy Wasserstein. At the same time, Whitfield tackles the complex issue of race and American Jewish culture, tracing the extensive interpenetrations of Jewish and African American music. He also offers a stunning examination of Jewish American representations of the Holocaust, focusing on stage and film adaptations of Anne Frank's Diary and on Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List. In a poignant, final chapter, Whitfield ponders the future of American Jewish culture after a century of assimilationist pressure and mainstream success. The distinctive culture that he has traced through the 20th century, Whitfield concludes, may finally become submerged and lost. Only a renewed emphasis on Judaism itself, he believes, offers the hope for American Jews to maintain the dual cultural identities that they have so long succeeded in nurturing --

What is the difference between writing a novel about the Holocaust and fabricating a memoir? Do narratives about the Holocaust have a special obligation to be "truthful" - i.e., faithful to the facts of history? Or, in other words, when is it okay to lie about the Holocaust? In her provocative study A Thousand Darknesses: Truth and Lies In Holocaust Fiction , Ruth Franklin investigates these questions as they arise in the most significant works of fiction about the Holocaust, from Tadeusz Borowski's Auschwitz stories to Jonathan Safran Foer's postmodernist family history. Franklin argues that the memory-obsessed culture of the last few decades has led to a mistaken focus on testimony as the primary form of writing about the Holocaust. As even the most canonical Holocaust texts have come under scrutiny for their fidelity to the facts, we have lost sight of the essential role that imagination plays in the creation of any literary work, including - perhaps especially — the memoir. Taking a fresh look at memoirs by Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, and examining novels by writers such as Piotr Rawicz, Jerzy Kosinski, W.G. Sebald, and Wolfgang Koeppen, Franklin makes a persuasive case for literature as an equally vital vehicle for understanding the Holocaust. The result is a study of immense depth and range that offers a lucid view of an often cloudy field.

This book is the first to systematically examine the representation of women by mainstream Hebrew authors from the Palmah Generation to the New Wave. Fuchs’ unique analytical method exposes the male-centered bias which often inspires the works of such prominent and widely translated authors as S. Yizhar, Moshe Shamir, A. B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz. She exposes both the continuities and the transformations in the literary representations of women and explains them in innovative ways, grounded in aesthetic, social, political, and cultural conditions and ideologies. The bold and unexpected discoveries offered by this book illuminate the complex ways in which Israel’s political predicaments, for example, affect the representation of women, as well as the various ways in which Israeli literature uses female images to express the anxiety and frustration arising from these predicaments. This pioneering study will be invaluable to feminist literary critics, scholars, and teachers and students of modern Hebrew literature.

Illuminates the wealth, themes, and character of Japanese literature from the fifteenth century to 1912 by introducing Western readers to the life, work, and literary style of twenty-one Japanese poets and writers.

Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger show that Holocaust literary representation has continued to flourish well into the twenty-first century-gaining increased momentum even as its perspective shifts, as a third generation adds its voice to the chorusof post-Holocaust writers. In negotiating the complex thematic imperatives and narrative conceits of the literature of third-generation writers, this bold new work examines those structures, tropes, patterns, ironies, disjunctions, and overall tensionsthat produce a literature that laments unrecoverable loss for a generation removed spatially and temporally from the extended trauma of the Holocaust. Aarons and Berger address evolving notions of "postmemory"; the intergenerational and ongoingtransmission of trauma; issues of Jewish cultural identity; inherited memory; the psychological tensions of post-Holocaust Jewish identity; the characteristic tropes of memory and the personalized narrative voice; issues of generational dislocationand anxiety; the recurrent antagonisms of assimilation and historical alienation; the imaginative re-creation and reconstruction of the past; and the future of Holocaust memory and representation. --Back cover.

Examines the effect of the Holocaust on traditional attempts to explain the Jewish people's sufferings while retaining the concept of covenant with God. also examines its influence on the self-image of American Jewry. Analyzes the works of Elie Wiesel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, and Cynthia Ozick, among others, and suggests that awareness of a covenantal concept of Judaism is a criterion for authentic Holocaust literature. Adopts the definition of the Holocaust as a unique event - the plan to exterminate an entire nation, and describes various approaches to theological problems raised by the Holocaust.

The description for this book, Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics, will be forthcoming.

Glickman argues that early immigrants to Canada brought with them the expectation that nature would be grand, mysterious, awesome - even terrifying - and welcomed scenes that conformed to these notions of sublimity. She contends that to interpret their descriptions of nature as "negative," as so many critics have done, is a significant misunderstanding. Glickman provides close readings of several important works, including Susanna Moodie's "Enthusiasm," Charles G.D. Roberts's Ave, and Paulette Jiles's "Song to the Rising Sun," and explores the poems in the context of theories of nature and art. Instead of projecting backward from a modernist perspective, Glickman reads forward from the discovery of landscape as a legitimate artistic subject in seventeenth-century England and argues that picturesque modes of description, and a sublime aesthetic, have governed much of the representation of nature in this country.

Stephen Greenblatt has been at the center of a major shift in literary interpretation toward a critical method that situates cultural creation in history. Shakespearean Negotiations is a sustained and powerful exemplification of this innovative method, offering a new way of understanding the power of Shakespeare's achievement and, beyond this, an original analysis of cultural process.

In her sparkling new book, Lillian Robinson looks at Wonder Women - all of them - Supergirl, Invisible Girl, Invisible Woman, She Hulk - and examines what these cartoon heroines mean for everyday life. Can you balance a home, career, and the struggle for justice? What about men? Does flying help? Drawing upon her long career as a formidable feminist critic yet wearing her knowledge lightly, Lillian Robinson finds the essence of wonder women in our non-animated three-dimensional world. This book will delight and provoke anyone interested in the history of feminism or the importance of comics in contemporary life.

States of Fantasy is Jacqueline Rose's striking contribution to the current controversy about the nature and limits of English studies. Why has relatively little attention been paid to Israel/Palestine and South Africa, both of which have the strongest historical and political links to Britain as well as to each other? What can these two arenas of historic conflict tell us about the limits of the literary imagination? What new imaginary worlds are being built in the present at the very moment when the literary institution attempts to shed the false dreams of the past?

Geoffery Hartman, one of the most distinguished literary scholars in America, has been a commentator on and participant in the literary-critical scene for more than forty years. He was one of the first to question the "formalism" of the New Critics, he helped to introduce such European critics as Benjamin, Malraux, Blanchot, Lacan, and Derrida to American audiences, and he has expanded our knowledge of the history of criticism by pointing to the relevance of the Jewish rabbinic tradition and of psychoanalytic modes of interpretation. This book -- a collection of Hartman's essays from throughout his career -- sheds new light on the last four turbulent decades of criticism. In a lengthy introduction to the book, Hartman tells us about his life, the scholars who were his teachers or colleagues (among them Rene Wellek, Erich Auerbach, Harold Bloom, and Paul de Man), and some of the intellectual issues he has grappled with over the course of his career. The essays in the volume, many of which are out of print or not previously collected, are arranged here in three parts: "Theory" (such influential pieces as "Understanding Criticism" and "The Voice of the Shuttle"); "Cases" (with subjects ranging from Shakespeare to Wordsworth and from Hitchcock to the mystery story); and "Speculations" (concluding with an essay on "Higher Education at the Millennium.") The collection -- vintage Hartman -- brings his exemplary work to a new generation of readers.

"The essays in this volume present interpretations of themes in major Jewish texts and thinkers, as well as treatments of significant issues in Jewish theology and ethics. It offers philosophical readings of biblical narratives, analyses of topics in the thought of Maimonides, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, and critical and constructive examinations of divine providence, religious anthropology, free will, 9/11, evil, Halakhah and morality, altruism, autonomy in Jewish medical ethics, and the epistemology of religious belief. The author frequently brings Jewish philosophy and law into dialogue with contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. The book serves scholars and students of Jewish philosophy and law, and is suitable for inclusion in syllabi of undergraduate and graduate courses''--Provided by the publisher.

This volume incorporates Darko Suvin's thinking on utopian horizons in fiction and on eutopian and dystopian readings of historical reality since the 1970s. While the focus is on the United States and the United Kingdom, the essays also draw on French, German and Russian sources. The book is composed of eighteen chapters, including four sets of poems. The chapters include heretic reflections on utopian fiction, science fiction and utopian studies, explorations of dystopias, and epistemological examinations of political standpoint. Throughout, plebeian history is the stance from which all the author's value judgements are made. The essays and poems engage with the empirical world and identify areas of hope. In a dark dystopian time, they reaffirm eutopia, the radically better place to be striven for in every here and now.

Ch. 7 (pp. 151-170), "Mark Twain's Vienna", is an expanded version of an article which appeared in "Commentary" 99 (May 1995). It was written as the introduction to a facsimile edition of Twain's "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays" (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

"There is something about stupidity that is untrackable; it evades our cognitive scanners and turns up as the uncanny double of mastery or intelligence."