Under-Writing: Forming an American Minority Literature

Abstract

From the beginning of the twentieth century until World War II, first and second generation European immigrants to the United States wrote about their experiences primarily in semi-autobiographical novels rather than in other literary forms. These works, now receiving the attention of scholars and the public alike, display the different attitudes immigrants had toward their minority status in their new country. Although some advocated Americanization and aspired to complete assimilation into the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture, many others wished to preserve their historical identities and resisted the temptation to abandon their traditional ways. Given this essential division of immigrant desire as expressed in these works, a reader can ask what effects the enmeshed ideologies of canonical assimilation and cultural separation had on the way the dominant American way of life was portrayed. Although written out of a European context, Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature offers a promising critical framework for discussing such a definitive division of desire among these ethnic groups.' Instead, I hope to show how that theory can be productively used as a port of entry to explore the various permutations of American ethnic literature. Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of the function of minor literature, which will be more comprehensively explained shortly, can be effectively tested against two of the greatest immigrant novels of the 1920s and 1930s, respectively, Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers (1925), and Pietro di Donato's Christ in Concrete (1939).2 These two novels represent different levels of assimilation and between them dramatize the major characteristics of the theorists' definition of minor literature. As test cases for Deleuze and Guattari's theory, they reveal its usefulness as well as its limitations. In doing so, these novels are also illuminated as representative of the essential historical and psychological split in immigrant desire, the split in the new hyphenated, Jewish-American or Italian-American subject. I hope to suggest plausibly that such a dialectical