Ethnic Modernisms: Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Dislocation

by D. Konzett

Overview

This study explores a new understanding of modernism and ethnicity as put forward in the transnational and diasporic writings of Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Rhys. In its selection of three modernists from apparently different cultural backgrounds, it is meant to make us rethink the role of modernism in terms of ethnicity and displacement. Konzett critiques the traditional understanding of the monocultural 'ethnic identity' often highlighted in the studies of these writers and argues that all three writers are better understood as ironic narrators of diaspora and movement and as avant-garde modernists. As a result, they offer an alternative aesthetics of modernism which is centered around the innovative narration of displacement. Her analysis of the complexities of language and form and impact of the complex and ambiguous formal styles of the three writers on the history of their reception is a model of the effective integration of formalist, historicist, and theoretical perspectives in literary criticism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349387465
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	02/06/2003
Edition description:	1st ed. 2002
Pages:	202
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.02(d)

About the Author

DELIA CAPAROSO KONZETT teaches film, drama, and literature at Yale University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and is the author of a number of articles on ethnic writing.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Ethnic Modernism and its Avant-Garde Anzia Yezierska and the Experience of the Assimilated Jew Introduction The New Immigration as Ethnic Catalyst The Experience of Immigrant English in Hungry Hearts The Conscious Pariah: Towards a Transnational Aesthetics From Hollywood to Hester Street: The Image of the Assimilated Jew in Hungry Hearts the Film Black Folk Culture and the Aesthetics of Displacement in Zora Neale Hurston Introduction Race, Nation and Art: The Harlem Renaissance The Folk in Harlem: Zora Neale Hurston's Urban Folklore The Transnational Perspective: The Experience of the African Diaspora in Tell My Horse and Moses, Man of the Mountain 'Getting in Touch with the True South': Pet Negroes, White Crackers and Racial Staging in Seraph on the Suwanee White Mythologies: Jean Rhys's Aesthetics of Posthumanism Introduction Wide Sargasso Sea: White Masks and their Creolization An Expatriate among Expatriates: The Banality of Exile Good Morning, Midnight: Commodity, Distraction and the Displaced Masses Concluding Remarks on the Marketability of Ethnicity Works Cited

Editorial Reviews

"Delia Konzett presents a compelling argument for the nature and significance of ethnic modernisms. Offering original readings of texts by Ania Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Rhys, she demonstrates the importance of their transnational perspectives for modernist aesthetics. In its argument for the significance of narrative displacement in our understanding of modernism, this book pushes current debates about ethnicity, race, national culture, and modernist writing in new and productive directions." - Mary Lou Emery, Associate Professor of English, University of Iowa

From the Publisher