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11	Facing the Limits of Fiction: Self-Consciousness in Jewish American Literature Kensky, Eitan Lev January 2013 (has links) This thesis explores the limits of fictional language by studying the work of Jewish American writer-critics, novelists who significantly engaged with literary criticism, and critics who experimented with the novel or short fiction. These writer-critics all believed in Literature: they believed that literature could effect social change and educate the masses; or they believed in literature as an art-form, one that exposed the myths underlying American society, or that revealed something fundamental about the human condition. Yet it is because they believed so stridently in the concept of Literature that they turned to non-fiction. Writing fiction exposed problems that Literature could not resolve. They describe being haunted by “preoccupations” that they could not exhaust in fiction alone. They apologetically refer to their critical texts as “by-products” of their creative writing. Writer-critics were forced to decide what the limits of fiction were, and they adopted other types of writing to supplement these unexpected gaps in fiction's power. This dissertation contains four chapters and an introduction. The introduction establishes the methodological difficulties in writing about author-critics, and introduces a set of principles to guide the study. Chapter 1 approaches Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). I argue that many of the novel's difficulties result from Cahan's desire to present the way that ideology shades our understanding of reality while minimizing direct narratorial intrusions. Chapter 2 studies how politics affected the work of Mike Gold, Moishe Nadir, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. In all three writers, literature emerges as a kind of ersatz-politics, a space for the dispossessed to imagine the political. In the end, the political novel only reinforces the fictionality. Chapter 3 is a study of Leslie Fiedler's problematic novel, The Second Stone. While critics have seen the novel as a kind of game, I propose reading the novel as an earnest expression of Fiedler's vision of literature as a conversation. Chapter 4 turns to Cynthia Ozick and Susan Sontag. A cumulative reading of their fiction and criticism shows the deep twinning of their fiction and critical thought. For both writers true knowledge comes only through the imagination. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Judaic studies American literature Comparative literature Authorial Criticism Jewish American Literature Literary Criticism Writer-Critics Yiddish Literature
12	Neue Handbücher zur jüdischen Literatur in Deutschland und den USA Wittler, Kathrin 23 July 2019 (has links) No description available. info:eu-repo/classification/ddc/290 ddc:290 info:eu-repo/classification/ddc/940 ddc:940
13	Too foul and dishonoring to be overlooked : newspaper responses to controversial English stars in the Northeastern United States, 1820-1870 Smith, Tamara Leanne 30 September 2010 (has links) In the nineteenth century, theatre and newspapers were the dominant expressions of popular culture in the northeastern United States, and together formed a crucial discursive node in the ongoing negotiation of American national identity. Focusing on the five decades between 1820 and 1870, during which touring stars from Great Britain enjoyed their most lucrative years of popularity on United States stages, this dissertation examines three instances in which English performers entered into this nationalizing forum and became flashpoints for journalists seeking to define the nature and bounds of American citizenship and culture. In 1821, Edmund Kean’s refusal to perform in Boston caused a scandal that revealed a widespread fixation among social elites with delineating the ethnic and economic limits of citizenship in a republican nation. In 1849, an ongoing rivalry between the English tragedian William Charles Macready and his American competitor Edwin Forrest culminated in the deadly Astor Place riot. By configuring the actors as champions in a struggle between bourgeois authority and working-class populism, the New York press inserted these local events into international patterns of economic conflict and revolutionary violence. Nearly twenty years later, the arrival of the Lydia Thompson Burlesque Troupe in 1868 drew rhetoric that reflected the popular press’ growing preoccupation with gender, particularly the question of woman suffrage and the preservation of the United States’ international reputation as a powerfully masculine nation in the wake of the Civil War. Three distinct cultural currents pervade each of these case studies: the new nation’s anxieties about its former colonizer’s cultural influence, competing political and cultural ideologies within the United States, and the changing perspectives and agendas of the ascendant popular press. Exploring the points where these forces intersect, this dissertation aims to contribute to an understanding of how popular culture helped shape an emerging sense of American national identity. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that in the mid-nineteenth century northeastern United States, popular theatre, newspapers, and audiences all contributed to a single media formation in which controversial English performers became a rhetorical antipode against which “American” identity could be defined. / text Actors Acting Alabama claims Anglophobia Astor Place Riot Audience Audiences Bowery Boys Burlesque Citizenship Class Controversy Democratic Party Kean, Edmund Forrest, Edwin England Femininity Feminism Gender Great Britain Rynders, Isaiah Jewish American identity Jews United States Identity Journalism Thompson, Lydia Masculinity Media Media formations Melodrama Walsh, Mike Noah, Mordecai National Advocate National identity Nationalism New York New York Herald New York Tribune Newspapers Nineteenth century Northeastern United States Logan, Olive Performance Popular culture Popular press Mass print media Republican Party Revolution, 1848-1849 Rhetoric Scandal Shakespeare Spirit of the Times Suffrage Nativism Theatre Touring stars Whig Party Macready, William Charles Richard III (play) Merchant of Venice Shylock

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