Proverbial Language and Literary Truth in the Work of Isaac Bashevis Singer

Jewish American Writing and World Literature studies Jewish American writers’ relationships with the idea of world literature—how they place themselves within its boundaries, outside its purview, or, most often, in constant motion across and beyond its maps and networks. Writers such as Sholem Asch, Jacob Glatstein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anna Margolin, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley all responded to a demand to write beyond local Jewish and American audiences and toward the world, as a global market and as a transnational ideal. At the same time, their work is deeply informed by an intimate connection to Yiddish, a Jewish vernacular with its own global network and institutional ambitions. This book tracks the attempts and failures, through translation, to find a home for Jewish vernacularity in the institution of world literature. Beyond fame and global circulation, world literature holds up the promise of legibility, in which a threatened origin becomes the site for redemptive literary creativity. But this promise inevitably remains unfulfilled, as writers struggle to balance potential universal achievements with untranslatable realities, rendering impossible any complete arrival in the US and in the world. The exploration of the translational uncertainty of Jewish American writing joins postcolonial critiques of US and world literature and challenges Eurocentric and Anglo-American paradigms of literary study. In bringing into conversation the fields of Yiddish studies, American Studies, and world literature theory, the book proposes a new approach to the study of modern Jewish literatures and their implication within global empires of culture.

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Isaac Bashevis Singer: An Interview, Part II

Contemporary Literature ◽

10.2307/1207569 ◽

1969 ◽

Vol 10 (3) ◽

pp. 332 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Isaac Bashevis Singer ◽

Cyrena N. Pondrom

Keyword(s):

Isaac Bashevis Singer

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Isaac Bashevis Singer on Writing for Children

Children s Literature ◽

10.1353/chl.0.0317 ◽

1977 ◽

Vol 6 (1) ◽

pp. 9-16

Author(s):

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Keyword(s):

Isaac Bashevis Singer

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From Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Hudson Review ◽

10.2307/3850043 ◽

1978 ◽

Vol 31 (4) ◽

pp. 621 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Richard Burgin ◽

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Keyword(s):

Isaac Bashevis Singer

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“What makes Human Beings into Moral Beings?” The Significance of Ethics in the Process of Evolution

Voluntas Revista Internacional de Filosofia ◽

10.5902/2179378634075 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 2 (2) ◽

pp. 03

Author(s):

Babette Babich

Keyword(s):

The Other ◽

Aboriginal Peoples ◽

Human Beings ◽

Pain Thresholds ◽

Isaac Bashevis Singer ◽

Cultural Expressions

Just as animals in general are described as “feeling” nothing like “pain” but “stimuli responses” or “behaviours,” scientific theorists once proposed to reduce the differences between socio-cultural expressions of pain to differences in general between the races: Black, White, Asian, and especially so-called aboriginal peoples and Nazi experiments on human pain extended the same test of pain thresholds from experiments performed on animals for centuries (the same experiments on animals unchecked to this day) to human beings designated as subhuman. Ethological studies by Franz de Waal suggest that animals share this capacity for sympathizing with the other. Schopenhauer’s notion of compassion thus serves as the basis for a new understanding of becoming moral. This essay situates Schopenhauer with respect to Kant as well as Nietszche and develops connections with Levinas and Adorno as well as Isaac Bashevis Singer

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