scholarly journals Charity institutions as networks of power: how Anzia Yezierska's characters resist philanthropic surveillance

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Rebeca E. Campos
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Monitoring Network ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Anzia Yezierska ◽  
Private Institutions ◽  
Charitable Organizations ◽  
National Values ◽  
Integration Of Immigrants ◽  
American Author ◽  
European Immigration

At the end of the nineteenth-century, American private institutions took the charge of spreading national values due to the massive wave of eastern European immigration. These institutions, especially charitable organizations, supported the integration of immigrants, however, from a classist perspective. According to the Polish-American author Anzia Yezierska (1885-1970), their apparently inclusive programs actually hindered the fulfilment of the discourse of the American Dream, which is based on the premise of preserving individual differences. By comparing those charitable institutions to Michel Foucault’s panoptical prison, this research attempts to demonstrate how the similarities between both structures help understand up to what extent the benefactresses in charge accurately managed to influence the newly arrived immigrants. The hierarchy of power established between them would determine the latter’s difficulties to achieve the recognition of their individualities from their intersectional experiences. The alternative to the monitoring network, thus, appears in the act of solidarity, a kind of resistance that allows ghettoized characters to perform their cultural distinctiveness away from Americanization.

Whitening Domestic Spaces: Enacting Female Roles in Anzia Yezierska's The Lost Beautifulness

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 9-26
Author(s):  
Rebeca Campos Ferreras
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Anzia Yezierska ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
Cultural Shock ◽  
European Immigrants ◽  
Female Stereotypes ◽  
Female Immigrants ◽  
Eastern European Immigrants

The aim of this research is to give an accurate account of how female stereotypes around the concept of hygiene and domesticity in early 20thC North American context influenced newly arrived Eastern European immigrants. Located in New York’s Lower East Side ghetto and determined by their Jewish background, these immigrants’ arrival caused them a cultural shock to the point that they started shaping their identities according to the new standard of beauty and cleanliness related to the Americanness they were eager to perform. For this purpose, Anzia Yezierska’s short story The Lost Beautifulness serves as a referent because it demonstrates the failure of Americanization as the prospective means through which the American Dream could be experienced, a credo which, according to the author, would only reinforce classist policies instead of cancelling them. To this effect, Yezierska depicts the actual consequences for these Jewish female immigrants after attempting to Americanize their private household spaces and maintain, thus, the standard of cleanliness necessary to validate their accurate adaptation to the American culture from their ghettoized and marginalized context. Keywords: Americanization, Anzia Yezierska, female stereotypes, whitening, domesticity, American Dream  

“Go, Make Yourself for a Person”: Urbanity and the Construction of an American Identity in the Novels of Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska

Prospects ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 295-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Von Rosk
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Anzia Yezierska ◽  
Abraham Cahan ◽  
Urban Novel ◽  
European Jewish

Recalling His Early Days in New York, Abraham Cahan declared that he “felt strongly drawn to the life of the city.” “My heart,” he wrote, “beat to its rhythm” (Marovitz, 17). Anzia Yezierska also remembers New York's Lower East Side at the turn of the century with affection in her autobiographical novel,Bread Givers. When her heroine Sarah Smolinsky is away from Hester Street, she longs for “the crowds sweeping you on like waves of a beating sea. The drive and thrill of doing things faster and faster” (129). For both of these Jewish immigrant writers, the spectacle of New York City embodied hope, liberation, and vitality, yet as they explore the immigrant's exhilarating and exasperating adaptation to urban life in America, they highlight the keen sense of loss on becoming American, on becoming modern. In their vivid depictions of late-19th-century New York life, both Cahan'sThe Rise of David Levinsky(1917) and Yezier-ska'sBread Givers(1925) detail in an especially dramatic fashion a story that had not been explored before in America's urban novel: the Eastern European Jewish immigrant's adaptation to America's consumer culture. Highlighting the role of mass-produced goods and new forms of leisure in constructing a modern, middle-class American identity, both novels examine the tensions and contradictions of immigrant life as a more communal culture of scarcity gives way to an individually oriented culture of material abundance.

scholarly journals Monsters in the Capital: Helen Vaughan, Count Dracula and Demographic Fears in fin-de-siècle London

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-164
Author(s):  
Daniel Renshaw
Keyword(s):  
Demographic Change ◽  
The Other ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Social Scale ◽  
Jewish Migration ◽  
Jewish Settlement ◽  
English Society ◽  
European Immigration ◽  
The Demonic

This article examines the confluence of fears of demographic change occasioned by Jewish migration to Britain between 1881 and 1905 with two key gothic texts of the period – Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan (1894) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). The descriptions of the activities of the demonic protagonists Helen Vaughan and Count Dracula in London will be compared with contemporary depictions of Jewish settlement by leading anti-migrant polemicists. Firstly, it will consider the trope of settlement as a preconceived plan being put into effect directed against ‘Anglo-Saxon’ English society. Secondly, it will look at ideas of the contested racial inferiority or superiority of the ‘other’. Thirdly, the article will examine the imputed chameleonic natures of both gothic monsters and Jews rising up the metropolitan social scale. The article will conclude by comparing the way Machen's and Stoker's protagonists deal with their opponents with posited ‘solutions’ for the Eastern European immigration ‘problem’.

The challenge of accounting for individual differences in folk-economic beliefs

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin C. Ruisch ◽  
Rajen A. Anderson ◽  
David A. Pizarro
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Individual Variation ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Economic Beliefs ◽  
Existing Data

AbstractWe argue that existing data on folk-economic beliefs (FEBs) present challenges to Boyer & Petersen's model. Specifically, the widespread individual variation in endorsement of FEBs casts doubt on the claim that humans are evolutionarily predisposed towards particular economic beliefs. Additionally, the authors' model cannot account for the systematic covariance between certain FEBs, such as those observed in distinct political ideologies.

Individual differences, social attention, and the history of the social motivation hypotheses of autism

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter C. Mundy
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Early Development ◽  
Emotional Development ◽  
Social Motivation ◽  
Social Attention ◽  
Social Emotional Development ◽  
Social Emotional ◽  
Precise Understanding ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

Abstract The stereotype of people with autism as unresponsive or uninterested in other people was prominent in the 1980s. However, this view of autism has steadily given way to recognition of important individual differences in the social-emotional development of affected people and a more precise understanding of the possible role social motivation has in their early development.

Elaborating the role of reflection and individual differences in the study of folk-economic beliefs

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Arceneaux
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Individual Differences ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Evolutionary History ◽  
Behavioral Responses ◽  
History Of ◽  
Economic Beliefs

AbstractIntuitions guide decision-making, and looking to the evolutionary history of humans illuminates why some behavioral responses are more intuitive than others. Yet a place remains for cognitive processes to second-guess intuitive responses – that is, to be reflective – and individual differences abound in automatic, intuitive processing as well.

Inter-individual variation shapes the human microbiome

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily F. Wissel ◽  
Leigh K. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Individual Variation ◽  
Human Microbiome ◽  
Individual Variability ◽  
Microbiota Composition ◽  
Target Article ◽  
Microbiome Research

Abstract The target article suggests inter-individual variability is a weakness of microbiota-gut-brain (MGB) research, but we discuss why it is actually a strength. We comment on how accounting for individual differences can help researchers systematically understand the observed variance in microbiota composition, interpret null findings, and potentially improve the efficacy of therapeutic treatments in future clinical microbiome research.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document