8. The critic’s “I”

“The critic’s “I”” argues that Jewish literature is not only what writers and readers do, but also the degree to which critics are constantly contextualizing it. Cultural thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Irving Howe, and Alfred Kazin, through a discerning “I” and a penetrating eye, allow literature to speak to society and vice versa. There is an important role for public intellectuals who have a connections with, or away from, institutions of higher learning. It is worth looking at the cases of Susan Sontag and Harold Bloom. Without criticism, literature is incapable of lasting meaning. In the case of Jewish literature, critics become torchbearers of transnational ideas.

2. The journeying self

There is a close connection between the rise of autobiography in the late 18th and early 19th century and the growing fascination with travel for its own sake, or for the sake of self-development. ‘The journeying self’ explains that with the rise of European Romanticism, Rousseau’s celebration of walking, Goethe’s Italian Journey, his fiction of Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre, and his autobiography, and Wordsworth ‘wandering’ in the Lake District initiate a pattern of links between life-writing and travel, which continued through the American ‘road trip’ and more recent ‘urban walking’ and the literature of landscape. The autobiographical writings of Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, and Alfred Kazin are discussed.

To the Heart of Europe

F. O. Matthiessen and Alfred Kazin were the advance guard of a generation of American scholars bringing American literature to Europe after the war, but their European encounters shaped “American literature” as a canon. Matthiessen was a gay Christian socialist who taught in Czechoslovakia just before the 1948 communist coup; he committed suicide, in 1950, having come under suspicion for “un-American” activities. Originally a scholar of Elizabethan translation, Matthiessen’s encounters in Europe changed his sense of what does and doesn’t get lost in carrying over a novel, an ideology, or the entire “American renaissance.” Kazin was a Jewish-American writer whose encounters in the wake of the Holocaust yielded opposing conclusions. Their dialogue, alongside European commentaries, illuminates the power of literature in postwar reconstruction. What did it mean for a Czech Americanist to read Keats in Buchenwald? And what did it mean for Europeans to read Moby-Dick in the postwar ruins?