Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p.267-285). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Comparative Literature, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

The present literary production in France indicates the return of the subject, which has been proclaimed dead since the New Novel. With the proliferation of autobiographical texts in the nineteen-eighties, a generalized movement towards an aesthetic genre valuing this particularity was noticed. This proliferation renders the scope of this literary form immense. It covers a range from strictly historical texts, including autobiographies, memoirs and intimate journals to semi-referential texts, qualified as autobiographical fictions, "autofictions" or again "factual fictions". Midway between the autobiography and the novel, autofiction, this little studied literary practice, inaugurates a new writing form which we believe constitutes one of the boldest modern incarnations of the writing of the self. This thesis considers the possibility of a correlation existing in the problematics of autofiction and those of Jewishness in writing. Already off-centered, the Jewish writer, can be seen as the emblematic figure of the writer himself. Drawing on a corpus of four writers (Serge Doubrovsky, Marcel Benabou, Regine Robin and Patrick Modiano), we examine the structure, as well as its functionning rules, woven through texts sharing Jewish authorship. These writers pose, each from his own specific perspective, the problem of Jewishness in writing. This correlation brings to light the exemplary nature of these texts with regards to the more generalized and thus far unprecedented strategy that is autofiction. The intersection of these historically marked problems, autofiction and Jewishness in writing, leads us inevitably to further reflection upon the tragedy of modernity, the Shoah and its omnipresent shadow in the works of our corpus.

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Zugl.: München, Univ., Diss., 2008

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The present project draws a comparison between the literature and thought of Hasidic Rabbi Nachman of Braslav (1772–1810) and Argentine writer and public intellectual Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986). It is organized around two components of their writing—a discursive self-positioning at “the edge” of tradition and a “cabbalistic” stylization of their narratives. The dissertation contextualizes these components within late eighteenth century Enlightenment ideology and emancipation policies, and mid-twentieth century political ideologies of Nazism and Fascism, respectively. The dissertation is bookended by a close comparative reading of their stories. It finds that each in his moment is greatly implicated in questions of resituating Jews and Judaism within broader society, and argues that the effort to aesthetically represent the changing social location of Jews is linked to their understanding of their respective literary projects more broadly. Finally, the study illuminates their shared conceptualization of modern Judaism as a literary model. The dissertation’s broader intervention in the filed of early modern and modern literature relates to the dynamic of rupture and continuity that is so central to categorizations of modern writing. It demonstrates that the fault lines of the rupture from tradition, vis-à-vis which modern literature has been constructed, was already present—poetically and discursively—in the “tradition” from which it purportedly departs. By combining the study of diverse geographies, histories, languages, cultures and genres, the present study articulates a comparative frame that challenges conventional categorizations of modern writing.

This dissertation explores the history of the translation of world literature into Yiddish through a series of interconnected case studies, stretching from the “founding” decade of modern Yiddish literature through its interwar acme. It features diachronic studies of single translator-authors (Sh. Y. Abramovitsh; Der Nister; Isaac Bashevis Singer) which consider the relationship between translations and original writing; synchronic views of transformative moments in Yiddish literary (translational) history across its multiple centers (1903; 1910; New York, Warsaw, Moscow); and “distant” readings of periodicals and anthologies with an eye to their particular explicit and implicit translation theories and practices as well as to the role of editors and publishers (Sholem Aleichem; Avrom Reyzen) in shaping both real and imagined literary markets. Throughout, it mobilizes the chronically-neglected genre of homegrown Yiddish literary criticism and theory (I.L. Peretz, Chaim Zhitlowsky, Moyshe Litvakov) in the hopes of understanding the shifting stakes and meanings of translation on the terms of translators, authors, critics, and readers themselves. By attending to the ways in which translations functioned as both sources of livelihood and engines of literary growth, this dissertation examines the desired and intermittently realized modernization and “normalization” of Yiddish literature on the world stage.