Unfinalized Moments

by Royal, Derek Parker

• ISBN13: 9781557535849
• ISBN10: 1557535841
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-11-15
• Publisher: Purdue Univ Pr

Summary

Focusing on a diversely rich selection of writers, the pieces featured in Unfinalized Moments: Essays in the Development of Contemporary Jewish American Fiction explore the community of Jewish American writers who published their first book after the mid-1980s. It is the first book-length collection of essays on this subject matter with contributions from the leading scholars in the field. The manuscript does not attempt to foreground any one critical agenda, such as Holocaust writing. Instead, it celebrates the presence of a newly robust, diverse, and ever-evolving body of Jewish American fiction. This literature has taken a variety of forms with its negotiations of orthodoxy, its representations of a post-Holocaust world, its reassertion of folkloric tradition, its engagements with postmodernity, its reevaluations of Jewishness, and its alternative delineations of ethnic identity. Discussing the work of authors such as Allegra Goodman, Michael Chabon, and Tova Mirvis, the fifteen contributors in this collection assert the ongoing vitality and ever-growing relevancy of Jewish American fiction.

Author Biography

Derek Parker Royal is the founder of the Philip Roth Society as well as founding Executive Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Philip Roth Studies. He is the editor of Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author (Praeger, 2005), and his essays on American literature and graphic narrative have appeared in such journals as Contemporary Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Modern Drama, Studies in the Novel, Critique, MELUS, Shofar, Studies in American Jewish Literature, International Journal of Comic Art, The Mark Twain Annual, and Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: Unfinalized Moments: Essays in the Development of Contemporary Jewish American Narrative	p. 1
Dialogues with Orthodoxy and History
"Hardly There Even When She Wasn't Lost": Orthodox Daughters and the "Mind-Body Problem" in Contemporary Jewish American Fiction	p. 17
Southern Discomfort: Revisiting the Jewish Question in Tova MirvisÆs The Ladies Auxiliary	p. 33
The Ethics of After: Melvin Jules Bukiet, Holocaust Fiction, and the Reemergence of an Ethical Sense in the Post-Holocaust World	p. 55
The Second-Generation Holocaust Nonsurvivor: Third-Degree Metalepsis and Creative Block in Art Spiegelman's Graphic Novel Maus	p. 69
"Unfinished Business": Journeys to Eastern Europe in Thane Rosenbaums Second Hand Smoke and Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated	p. 81
Folklore, Fantasy, and the Metanarrative
The Escapist: Fantasy, Folklore, and the Pleasures of the Comic Book in Recent Jewish American Holocaust Fiction	p. 97
A Tale Told about Idiots: The Chelm Story and Holocaust Representation	p. 113
Laughter and Trembling: The Short Fiction of Steve Stern and Nathan Englander	p. 125
Metafictional Witnessing in Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated	p. 139
(Re)inscribing Jewish Text and Identity
Putting the "Jewish" Back in "Jewish American Fiction": A Look at Jewish American Fiction since 1977 and an Allegorical Reading of Nathan Englander s "The Gilgul of Park Avenue"	p. 153
"Were it Not for the Yetzer Hara": Eating, Knowledge, and the Physical in Jonathan Rosen's Eve's Apple	p. 169
The Sweetheart Is Outside Herself: Writing the Contemporary Jewish American Writer in S. L. Wisenberg's Ceci Rubin Stories	p. 179
Jewish American Fiction on the Border: Culture Confrontations, Double Consciousness, and Hybridity in the Work of Pearl Abraham	p. 187
Authors in Their Own Words
Margins within the Margins: An Interview with Ruth Knafo Setton and Farideh Dayanim Goldin	p. 203
Picturing American Stories: An Interview with Ben Katchor	p. 223
Questions for Discussion	p. 245
Contemporary Jewish American Fiction: A Selected Bibliography	p. 247
Contributors	p. 251
Index	p. 255
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