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

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This dissertation investigates the ways scientific and biotechnological advancement impact and change Jewish law and ethics. It analyzes the contemporary Jewish bioethical debate concerning the identification of maternity and paternity in four cases of assisted reproductive technologies (ART): in vitro fertilization, gestational surrogacy, cloning, and mitochondrial replacement therapy. Unprecedented modes of procreation engender new definitions of parenthood, challenging a longstanding Jewish framework of theology, law, and ethics. Part I develops a conceptual scaffolding for the discrete analyses of Part II, and considers the philosophical bases of parenthood, the gendered nature of Jewish legal bioethics, the relationship of law and ethics, and ways of relating religion and science. For each case of ART, Part II examines the biological science and technology in historical context, locates Jewish bioethical concerns within the larger bioethical discussion, and critically reviews the epistemological and axiological dimensions of the legally oriented analyses of a select group of leading Jewish bioethicists, chosen for their copious writings on ART and contextualizing oeuvres: Rabbi J. David Bleich, Rabbi Michael J. Broyde, Rabbi Elliot N. Dorff, and the collaborative writings of Dr. John D. Loike and Rabbi Moshe D. Tendler. Insights from Jewish feminist bioethical criticism and other notable Jewish bioethical works enhance the analyses. Through a focused study of the redefinition of parenthood in Jewish law and bioethics, I demonstrate four ways in which advances in science impact Jewish law and ethics. One, scientific awareness leads to greater sophistication and nuance of analysis. Two, Jewish bioethicists grapple with religion and science relations, and speak directly to these overarching considerations. Three, the epistemological and axiological influence of religion and science relations correlate with greater openness to new technologies, theoretical conceptualizations, and their practical applications. Four, advances in science change Jewish legal and bioethical analyses and outcomes through (at least) four possible methodological mechanisms – namely, theoretic holism, innovative interpretation, indeterminate gaps, and realist realignment. Jewish bioethics are thus shown to illumine the intricate interrelationship between religion and science and its impact on Jewish law and ethics.

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The present dissertation is a case study in applied phenomenology, specifically the postcolonial phenomenology of racism theorized by Lewis Gordon and applied to scholarly studies conducted on African American Jews and their kinfolk. My thesis is the following: Presumptively ontological human natures cannot function axiomatically for humanistic research on African American Jews. A humanistic science of Africana Jews must foreground the lived social worlds that permit such Jews to appear as ordinary expressions of humanity. The basic premise here is that subaltern (or denied) humanity exists in a neocolonial social world by virtue of an ordinariness that supervenes on humanity. For example, the more historians consider Africana Jews as ordinary, the more Africana Jews' humanity will appear. And the more human Africana Jews appear, the more inhuman their extraordinary appearance appears. This symbiosis constitutes a basic existential condition. When research on Africana Jews ignores this condition, it succumbs to ontological Jewishnness and other concepts rooted in what postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon calls the "colonial natural attitude. / Religion

As women began to establish themselves in the United States workforce in the first half of the twentieth century, one especial group of career women, women writers, began to use the space of their self-authored life writing narratives to inscribe their own understanding of themselves. Roundly criticized for not adhering to conventional autobiographical standards, these women writers used purposeful political strategies of resistance to craft self-authored life writing works that varied widely from the genre of autobiography. Rather than employ the usual ways critiquing autobiographical texts, I explore a deeper understanding of what these prescient women sought to do. Through revision of the terminology of the field and in consideration of a wide variety of critics and approaches, I argue that these women intentionally employed resistance in their writings. In Dust Tracks on A Road (1942), Zora Neale Hurston successfully established her own sense of herself as a black woman, who could also comment on political issues. Her fellow Southerner, Eudora Welty in One Writer’s Beginnings (1984), used orality to deliberately showcase her view of her own life. Another Southern writer, Lillian Smith in Killers of the Dream, employed an overtly social science approach to tell the life narrative of all white Christian Southerners, and described how she felt the problems of racism should be overcome. Anzia Yezierska, a Russian émigré to the United States, used an Old World European understanding of storytelling to refashion an understanding of herself as a writer and at the same time critiqued the United States in her work, Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950). Mary Austin, a Western woman writer, saw Earth Horizon as an opportunity to reclaim the fragmentation of a woman’s life as a positive, rather than a negative space.

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