A house of words : Jewish writing, identity and memory / Norman Ravvin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ravvin, Norman, 1963-

Series:

McGill-Queen's studies in ethnic history. Series two.

McGill-Queen's studies in ethnic history. Series two

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American fiction--Jewish authors--History and criticism.

American fiction.

American fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

Jews in literature.

Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature.

Physical Description:

x, 191 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.

Edition:

1st ed.

Other Title:

Jewish writing, identity and memory

Place of Publication:

Montreal ; Buffalo : McGill-Queen's University Press, c1997.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Arguing that Jewish North American writing is too commonly discussed as part of the mainstream, neglecting the Jewish aspects of the works, Ravvin places the writing of Bellow, Richler, Cohen, West, Mandel, Roth, and Rosenfarb within the Jewish context that the works demand. Ravvin depicts a Jewish cultural landscape within which postwar writers contend with community and identity, continuity and loss, and highlights the way this particular landscape is entangled with broader literary and cultural traditions. He considers Bellow and West alongside apocalyptic narratives, discusses Cohen in relation to the counterculture, examines Mandel's postmodern view of history, and looks at autobiography and ethics in Roth and Rosenfarb. At once scholarly and poetic, A House of Words will appeal to the general reader of Canadian, American, and Jewish literature and history, as well as to specialists in these fields.

Contents:

Front Matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Illustrations

Introduction: This World and Others

What Sort of Home Is the Past?

Forethought: Building a House of Words

Eli Mandel’s Family Architecture: Building a House of Words on the Prairies

Writing around the Holocaust: Uncovering the Ethical Centre of Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers

Taking the Victims’ Side: Mordecai Richler’s Response to the Holocaust in St. Urbain’s Horseman

Strange Presences

Forethought: Facing Up to the Past

Strange Presences on the Family Tree: The Unacknowledged Literary Father in Philip Roth’s The Prague Orgy

Philip Roth’s Literary Ghost: Rereading Anne Frank

Ghost Writing: Chava Rosenfarb’s The Tree of Life

Confronting Apocalypse

Forethought: On Refusing to End

Apocalypse Stalled: The Role of Traditional Archetype and Symbol in Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust

An End to Endings: Saul Bellow’s Anti-Apocalyptic Novel

The Collaborator

Forethought

Warring with Shadows: The Holocaust and the Academy

Conclusion: In Search of a Multicultural Tradition

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [177]-187) and index.

ISBN:

1-282-85474-7

9786612854743

0-7735-6684-8

OCLC:

929121388