40. Kraus, Simone. 2016. Prag in der amerikanischen Literatur: Cynthia Ozick und Philip Roth [Prague in American literature: Cynthia Ozick and Philip Roth]. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 443 pp.

2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-63
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Philip Roth ◽  
Frankfurt Am Main ◽  
Cynthia Ozick

5. Into the mainstream

2021 ◽  
pp. 50-60
Author(s):  
Ilan Stavans
Keyword(s):  
International Literature ◽  
Anzia Yezierska ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Philip Roth ◽  
Saul Bellow ◽  
Abraham Cahan ◽  
Cynthia Ozick ◽  
Isaac Bashevis Singer ◽  
Grace Paley ◽  
Jewish Writers

“Into the mainstream” looks at immigrant Jewish writers in America, such as Abraham Cahan (The Rise of David Levinsky), Anzia Yezierska (Bread Givers), and Isaac Bashevis Singer (Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories), all of whom transitioned from Yiddish into English, and analyzes Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep as a transitional novel. We notice here the transition from “ethnic” to “national” writer in the careers of Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, and Cynthia Ozick. Much was gained and lost in Jewish literature as a result of Jews becoming a “successful minority” in America. Jewish readers have always been a voracious audience of international literature.

Some Thoughts on the Mutual Displacements/Appropriations/Accommodations of Culture in Several Fictions by Toni Morrison, Cynthia Ozick, and Grace Paley

Prospects ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 387-404
Author(s):  
Emily Miller Budick
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cynthia Ozick ◽  
History Of ◽  
Entire History

InPlaying in the Dark, Toni Morrison sets out to chart a new “geography” in literary criticism, to provide a “map” for locating what she calls the “Africanist” presence in the American literary tradition. The assumption of Americanist critics, she argues, has been that “traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the fourhundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then, African Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence — which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture — has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture's literature.” For Morrison, recording the Africanist presence produces nothing less than an absolute revision of our notion of what constitutes the American literary tradition.

Cross Scripts: Inscribing Hebrew into Jewish American Literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 90-107
Author(s):  
Hana Wirth-Nesher
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Rites Of Passage ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Philip Roth ◽  
Jewish American Literature ◽  
Achy Obejas ◽  
Joshua Cohen ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
Michael Chabon

Abstract Most Jewish immigrants to America during the early 20th century arrived speaking Yiddish or Ladino and using Hebrew and Aramaic for liturgical purposes. When subsequent generations abandoned the first two languages, Hebrew and Aramaic were retained, used primarily for liturgy and rites of passage. Jewish American writers have often inserted Hebrew into their English texts by either reproducing the original alphabet or transliterating into Latin letters. This essay focuses on diverse strategies for representing liturgical Hebrew with an emphasis on the poetic, thematic, and sociolinguistic aspects of these expressions of both home and the foreign. Hebrew transliteration is discussed for its literary (rather than phonetic) rendering, for its multilingual creative contact with the other languages and cultures of each narrative. Among the authors whose works are discussed are Philip Roth, Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander, Joshua Cohen, Achy Obejas, and Gary Shteyngart.

scholarly journals Repression and Realism in Postwar  American Literature 1945-1955

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Erin Mercer
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Philip Roth ◽  
Repetition Compulsion ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
Cultural Conformity

<p>This thesis focuses on the uncanny in literature produced in America during the first decade following World War II. The period between 1945 and 1955 was marked by repressive socio-political forces such as McCarthyism and cultural conformity which complicated the representation of what Philip Roth refers to as "demonic reality." I explore the ways in which the avoidance and minimisation of the unpleasant created a highly circumscribed version of postwar American life while also generating a sense of objectless anxiety. According to the theories of Sigmund Freud, repression inevitably stages a return registered as the "uncanny." Animism, magic, the omnipotence of thoughts, the castration complex, death, the double, madness, involuntary repetition compulsion, live burial and haunting are all deemed capable of provoking a particular anxiety connected to what lies beneath the surface of accepted reality. Although it is common to argue that fantasy genres such as science fiction and gothic represent the return of what is repressed, this thesis explores several realist novels displaying uncanny characteristics. The realist novels included here are uncanny not only because they depict weird automaton-like characters, haunting, and castration anxieties, thus exhibiting a conscious use of Freudian theory, but because the texts themselves act as the return of the repressed. Norman Mailer referred to this unsettling phenomenon when he described writing as the "spooky" art; spooky because although a writer might sit down to consciously write a particular story, another unwilled story might very well appear.</p>

Game On: Encounters with the Magic of Baseball in Japanese Postmodern Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher T. Keaveney
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Philip Roth ◽  
Postmodern Literature ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Postmodern Fiction ◽  
Bernard Malamud ◽  
Cultural Shifts

Chapter 5 builds upon the foundation established in Chapter 4 by examining a particular approach to literature, Postmodernism, and describing how the postmodern literature that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s in Japan, indebted to postmodern baseball fiction in the United States, exemplifies the continuing appeal of baseball as a literary subject and of baseball’s capacity to adapt to cultural shifts. The chapter provides analyses of four baseball-themed works including fiction by the well-know postmodern novelists Murakami Haruki and Takahashi Genichirō, and more recent works by Nagao Seio and Enjō Tō, to demonstrate the possibilities that baseball fiction offers for avant-garde literary experimentation, possibilities exploited in American literature by writers from Philip Roth to Bernard Malamud. This chapter also charts how, ironically, Nagao Seio in his novel Shiki and Sōseki’s Big Game, achieves a remarkable pastiche in which one of the protagonists is none other than Masaoka Shiki with whom this survey of cultural representations of baseball in Japan begins.

Introduction: American Jewish Writing Today

AJS Review ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-230
Author(s):  
Naomi Sokoloff
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Philip Roth ◽  
Cynthia Ozick ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Allegra Goodman ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Thane Rosenbaum ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Exciting Time ◽  
Michael Chabon

This is an exciting time for North American Jewish literature. In the past ten years, there has been an explosion of writing by new and established authors. In the field of fiction alone, the shelves have filled with titles by such fine talent as Pearl Abraham, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander, Myla Goldberg, Ehud Havatzelet, Dara Horn, Jonathan Safran Foer, Joan Leegant, Tova Mirvis, Jon Papernick, Jonathan Rosen, Aryeh Lev Stollman, and many others, as well as new works by veteran writers such as Allegra Goodman, Thane Rosenbaum, and Steve Stern. Add to these names the preeminent Cynthia Ozick, and don’t forget Philip Roth, whose productivity continues unabated and whose latest novels include some of his strongest work ever. A variety of striking themes has come to the fore in this new wave of literary creativity. Notable trends include an unprecedented attention to religion (especially Orthodox Jewish life); a fascination with women’s lives and with questions of gender and sexual orientation; a concern with the experiences of the second and succeeding generations of the Holocaust; a nostalgia for and rediscovery of the old country; a consideration of new Americans in the 1980s and 1990s; and a rethinking of what it means to be a Jew in Israel and in the Diaspora.

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