Jewish American and Holocaust Literature: Representation in the Postmodern World

by Alan L. Berger (Editor), Gloria L. Cronin (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780791484449
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	02/01/2012
Series:	SUNY series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	266
File size:	409 KB

About the Author

Alan L. Berger is the Raddock Eminent Scholar Chair of Holocaust Studies and directs the Holocaust and Judaic Studies program and the Center for the Study of Values and Violence after Auschwitz at Florida Atlantic University. His previous books include Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust, also published by SUNY Press, and the Encyclopedia of Holocaust Literature (coedited with David Patterson and Sarita Cargas). Gloria L. Cronin is Professor of English at Brigham Young University and has written and edited numerous books, including A Room of His Own: In Search of the Feminine in the Novels of Saul Bellow.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Alan L. Berger, Gloria L. Cronin

PART ONE: HOLOCAUST LITERATURE

1. Hidden Children: The Literature of Hiding
Alan L. Berger

2. An Eye on a Scrap of the World: Ida Fink's Hidden Witnesses
Ellen S. Fine

3. Jerzy Kosinski: Did He or Didn't He?
Harry James Cargas

4. By the Light of Darkness: Six Major European Writers Who Experienced the Holocaust
Hugh Nissenson

5. Memory and Collective Identity: Narrative Strategies Against Forgetting in Contemporary Literary Responses to the Holocaust
Gerhard Bach

6. The Rendition of Memory in Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl
Marianne M. Friedrich

7. A Speck of Dust Blown by the Wind Across Land and Desert: Images of the Holocaust in Lanzmann, Singer, and Appelfeld
Gila Safran Naveh

8. Writing to Break the Frozen Seas Within: The Power of Fiction in the Writings of Norma Rosen and Rebecca Goldstein
Susan E. Nowak

9. Art and Atrocity in a Post-9/11 World
Thane Rosenbaum

PART TWO: JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

10. Africanity and the Collapse of American Culture in the Novels of Saul Bellow
Gloria L. Cronin

11. The Jewish Journey of Saul Bellow: From Secular Satirist to Spiritual Seeker
Sarah Blacher Cohen

12. Philip Roth and Jewish American Literature at the Millennium
Bonnie Lyons

13. Malamud and Ozick: Kindred Neshamas
Evelyn Avery

14. Myth and Addiction in Jonathan Rosen's Eve's Apple
Suzanne Evertsen Lundquist

15. Evolving Paradigms of Jewish Women in Twentieth-Century American Jewish Fiction: Through a Male Lens/Through a Female Lens
S. Lillian Kremer

16. After the Melting Pot: Jewish Women Writers and the Man in the Wrong Clothes
Miriyam Glazer

17. Restorying Jewish Mothers
Janet Burstein

Contributors

Index