Never better! : the modern Jewish picaresque / Miriam Udel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Udel, Miriam.

Contributor:

Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan), publisher.

Series:

Michigan studies in comparative Jewish cultures

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Marginality, Social, in literature.

Yiddish literature--History and criticism.

Yiddish literature.

Jews in literature.

Outsiders in literature.

Picaresque literature--Themes, motives.

Picaresque literature.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource.

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2016]

System Details:

text file

Summary:

It was only when Jewish writers gave up on the lofty Enlightenment ideals of progress and improvement that the Yiddish novel could decisively enter modernity. Animating their fictions were a set of unheroic heroes who struck a precarious balance between sanguinity and irony that author Miriam Udel captures through the phrase "never better." With this rhetorical homage toward the double-voiced utterances of Sholem Aleichem, Udel gestures at these characters' insouciant proclamation that things had never been better, and their rueful, even despairing admission that things would probably never get better. The characters defined by this dual consciousness constitute a new kind of protagonist: a distinctively Jewish scapegrace whom Udel denominates the polit or refugee. Cousin to the Golden Age Spanish picaro, the polit is a socially marginal figure who narrates his own story in discrete episodes, as if stringing beads on a narrative necklace. A deeply unsettled figure, the polit is allergic to sentimentality and even routine domesticity. His sequential misadventures point the way toward the heart of the picaresque, which Jewish authors refashion as a vehicle for modernism-not only in Yiddish, but also in German, Russian, English, and Hebrew. Udel draws out the contours of the new Jewish picaresque by contrasting it against the nineteenth-century genre of progress epitomized by the Bildungsroman. While this book is grounded in modern Jewish literature, its implications stretch toward genre studies in connection with modernist fiction more generally. Udel lays out for a diverse readership concepts in the history and theory of the novel while also explicating the relevant particularities of Jewish literary culture. In addressing the literary stylistics of a "minor" modernism, this study illuminates how the adoption of a picaresque sensibility allowed minority authors to write simultaneously within and against the literary traditions of Europe. Book jacket.

Contents:

In life, but not of it: the modernist picaresque

Sharks and marks: the swindles and seductions of modernity

Living serially: Neoteny and the polit

The polit at the waning of Haskalah : demobilized soldiers, demobilized Jews

Steel and iron: a study in Maskilic manhood

Spillage and shards: the polit between the wars

The polit under tsars and stripes

You must to dare! Afterlives of the polit.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 229-240) and index.

Description based on information from the publisher.

ISBN:

9780472073054

9780472053056

9780472121731

Publisher Number:

10.3998/mpub.8834858

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.