Louis Harap, Creative Awakening: The Jewish Presence in Twentieth-Century American Literature, 1900–1940 (New York, Westport, CT, & London: Greenwood Press, 1987, £22.50). Pp. 197. ISBN 0 313 25386 2.

1989 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 169-170
Author(s):  
Gert Buelens
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Twentieth Century American Literature

The Labour of Laziness in Twentieth-Century American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zuzanna Ladyga
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Ernest Hemingway ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Value System ◽  
John Barth ◽  
The Status ◽  
Twentieth Century American Literature ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Historical Moment

The Labour of Laziness in Twentieth-Century American Literature focuses on the issue of productivity, using the figure of laziness to negotiate the relation between the ethical and the aesthetic. This book argues that major twentieth-century American writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, John Barth, Donald Barthelme and David Foster Wallace provocatively challenge the ethos of productivity by filtering their ethical interventions through culturally stigmatised imagery of laziness. Ladyga argues that when the motif of laziness appears, it invariably reveals the underpinnings of an emerging value system at a given historical moment, while at the same time offering a glimpse into the strategies of rebelling against the status quo

Rising from the Gutter

2020 ◽  
pp. 67-92
Author(s):  
Jean Lee Cole
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Lower East Side ◽  
East Side ◽  
Jewish American Literature ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
English Speaking

This chapter shows how the early comic strip was developed and then came to influence comic fiction in the early twentieth century. As the editor of the New York Journal‘s comic supplement, Rudolph Block regularized the use of panels, repetitive storylines, and caricature, resulting in the multi-panel format that defines the comic-strip genre. Block’s role in the development of the comic strip has gone largely unrecognized; as a writer of Jewish American literature, Block has been forgotten. Using the pseudonym Bruno Lessing, Block published nearly a hundred stories between 1905 and 1920 in popular magazines. These humorous stories, full of rich dialect and accompanied by vibrant illustrations, translated the multiethnic culture of the Lower East Side for a mainstream, English-speaking audience. Block represented dialect and caricature as opportunities for negotiation and play, providing ways to display identity in multiple and shifting forms.

Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature. By Huang Yunte. [Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 2002. xv+209 pp. $ 24.95. ISBN 0-520-23223-2.]

2003 ◽  
Vol 173 ◽  
pp. 214-251
Author(s):  
Cosima Bruno
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Key Words ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
University Of California ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Twentieth Century American Literature

The key words provided in the title – “ethnography,” “translation” and “intertextual travel” – as well as various combinations of these terms, explain the contents of this book, which sets out two main aims: to give an exposition of Orientalist cultural work in 20th-century American letters; and to consider this cultural work from a textual point of view.

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