Jewish American Literary History Research Articles

The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity by Benjamin Schreier

Reviewed by: The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity by Benjamin Schreier Rachel Rubinstein Benjamin Schreier. The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 224 pp. Benjamin Schreier's The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature announces its ambitions with a book cover modeled on that of Philip Roth's iconic Portnoy's Complaint. Determinedly provocative, polemical, and pugilistic, Schreier's manifesto continues his efforts in 2015's The Impossible Jew to unsettle the fundamental dependence of Jewish American literary study on "the representational capacities of the word 'Jewish'" (7). Schreier, Yiddish for "screamer," is the longtime editor of the superb journal Studies in American Jewish Literature (for which, full disclosure, I serve as the book review editor); there is no one better positioned than he to diagnose and comment upon the current state of our field. Schreier's introduction and first chapter lay out his metacritical approach to Jewish American literary study: that identity should be understood as an epistemological rather than ontological category; that Jewish American literary study needs to release itself from the expectation that it reflect Jewish American historical reality and indeed declare "independence from history"; that Jewish studies is the analysis "not of Jews, but about how we know about Jews"; and that the organization of the "new" Jewish studies around terms like "identity," "ethnicity," and "culture" has in fact resulted in the field's isolation and exceptionalist "insiderism." The book's central chapters lay out the postwar literary "breakthrough" narrative that has fundamentally shaped the sense of Jewish American literary history, focusing on its point of origin with Irving Howe's use of Yiddish in his literary anthologies, and then on its "fall," or at least a limit case of Jewish textuality: Cynthia Ozick's critique of John Updike's Bech stories in the 1990s as inauthentic "passing" narratives. Schreier writes that the Roth, Bellow, and Malamud "emergence" narrative is "perversely restaged" over and over again as the "formation scene" of the Jewish American literary field, as scholars repeatedly attempt "to prove the field's proper institutional place and professional legitimacy" (40). But the provocation of Rise and Fall inheres less in Schreier's assertions than in his style. Commingling high theory with an aggressive, jocular familiarity, what was described by one reviewer as scabrous and funny in The Impossible Jew feels more bitter, competitive, and personal here. Portnoy's Complaint provides more than just the cover design; unwittingly Schreier seems to re-enact the gendered, familial psychodrama of the novel. Ruth Wisse and Cynthia Ozick, for whom Schreier reserves his most acrid invective, take turns as the vilified Sophie Portnoy; a number of female colleagues are the book's Hannah Portnoys, the overlooked sister Alex both depends upon and condescends to; and finally Alana Newhouse serves as the abused Monkey. (Or perhaps Newhouse is Brenda Patimkin, imported from another fiction, since Schreier devotes a two-page footnote to a scorching denunciation of Newhouse for her inability to adequately theorize her own nose job—or maybe for having had a nose job and not feeling [End Page 209] bad about it.) Finally, Michael Kramer, to whom the book is dedicated and who, in his acknowledgements, Schreier frets will not "endorse" it, is clearly his Dr. Spielvogel. I will confess that I am one of those scholars—mostly women—mentioned by Schreier as doing Jewish American literary studies wrong. While I am in the company of scholars I admire, I find myself gazing sadly across a mystifying chasm of methodological purity at a much smaller cohort of scholars I admire equally and who, according to Schreier, are getting it right. It is not just that Schreier praises a handful of only male scholars, and singles out primarily women for doing the kind of identitarian, "biologistic," or nationalist literary work he despises (which he identifies even in the work of scholars who critically interrogate such terms) or that when he does insult men he does so in considerably gentler terms than he does women. It is that his blind spots end up limiting his...

The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity by Benjamin Schreier

Reviewed by: The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity by Benjamin Schreier Saul Noam Zaritt (bio) The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity. By Benjamin Schreier. Philadelphia: University Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 228 pp. The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature begins with a startling claim: "Nothing testifies to the etiolation of the field of Jewish American literary study—my field—so much as the fact that so few people ever fight about anything" (1). The claim is startling because by traditional metrics—say, number of books and articles published per year—the field is healthy. Yet one of Schreier's central claims is that despite this activity, there has been little debate on the terms of Jewish American literary study. While in other fields there is repeated theorization of concepts like ethnicity and race, there is something of a silence around "Jewishness" in Jewish American literature. Schreier argues that the coherence of "Jewishness" is often taken for granted, observing how critics, from the postwar to the present, view Jewish American writing as directly reflecting a recognizable and legible Jewish population. This Schreier calls the field's "ethnological" foundation, in which a descriptive, ethnographic mode of literary study [End Page 99] precedes and precludes critical analysis. He identifies how critics circle around the idea of "breakthrough," in which a group of writers (Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, and others) is seen as emerging out of immigrant origins to arrive in the American mainstream, becoming representative figures of Jewish American history. The Jewishness of these writers is taken as a given, their writing automatically cohering within a narrative of Jewish American arrival that often turns on ideas of model minorities and on the uninterrogated convergence of Ashkenazi Jewishness and whiteness. Schreier calls this "autoethnography" nationalist, "ancillary" to a normalized and self-evident "historical record of Jews in America" (9). This leads, for Schreier, to a dangerous insiderism, in which Jewish intellectuals labor in service of a closed cultural system rather than interrogate the grounds of discourse. Schreier demands instead a shift from "an analysis of Jews" to an analysis of "discourses about Jews" (10). In Chapter 1, Schreier tracks how "breakthrough" came to dominate the field, outlining the field's "ambivalent foundation" and contested relationship with multiculturalism (39). He notes how institutionalizing the mythologized success of Jewish American assimilation distanced the field from the critical approaches of ethnic studies; at the same time, the mainstreaming of Jewish difference threatened the cherished exceptionalism of Jewish culture. This resulted, paradoxically, in the ghettoization of Jewish American literary study at the moment of its "emergence." Chapter 2 extends this critique to the instrumentalization of Yiddish literature within this narrative: "The Yiddish literary past was repurposed … as that manifestation of Jewish cultural heritage that could become a nostalgic object of identification for American Jews, the consumption and capitalization of which promised the affective reproduction of Jewish American identity" (74). Concentrating on Irving Howe's anthologies, Schreier shows how Yiddish was ossified through "ideological capture" to support the idea of "breakthrough" (78). Chapter 3 considers the concept of ethnicity, analyzing Cynthia Ozick's criticism to show how Jewish ethnic identity became a "fulcrum on which the Jewish American literary field was able to consolidate" (161). The project of Jewish identity comes to "normalize an ethnologically representational historicism as the authoritative way of thinking about Jewish American writing" (124). Schreier maps this "history of Jewish American literary history" onto the work of a string of literary critics—Leslie Fiedler, Howe, Ruth Wisse, Ozick, and many others. His approach is stridently polemical, revealing how critics produced a normative Jewish population "whose history is the duty … of Jewish studies intellectuals to uncover, archive, and narrate" (170). From Ozick's trouble with multiculturalism to Wisse's [End Page 100] nationalism, Schreier takes a measure of joy in assaulting these thinkers, often leaving the topic of a given chapter well behind in order to pursue a line of critique. Schreier's text brims with aggression, repeatedly answering the challenge of the book's opening sentence. But what does this aggression ultimately do...

The Object of Jewish American Literary History

Abstract This essay explores assumptions underwriting literary categorization, focusing on Jewish American literary history in particular (mostly), and considers the scalar logic that allows us to link the singular text, with all of its luminous possibility, with the particular world of a given literary category. The essay’s first section critiques major claims about Jewish American literary history made over the last 20 years by observing the persistently underexamined use of a metaphorical and metaphysical concept of identity, and then lays out problems with scaling up between select texts and the larger category of a given field of literature. Problems of scale in Jewish American literary history are highlighted by comparison with recent critiques of African American literary history. Scale itself harbors problems of commensurability insofar as scaling between a single object and a set to which the object belongs requires acts of comparison which leap over differences of kind, a problem explored in the essay’s second section through analogies with problems of commensurability in the discipline of physics. The third section locates those problems of commensurability in Nicole Krauss’s novel Forest Dark (2017) and reads that novel’s direct confrontation with literary history as exemplifying how literary scholars can foreground multiplicity and possibility, precisely through the foregrounding of their own situated practice as interested agents. Rather than reproduce that figment by projecting a historically continuous and recognizable Jewishness across two centuries of literature, Jewish American literary studies should ally and coordinate itself with the field-questioning work occurring among Black and Latinx studies scholars who substantiate the salience of their field’s identity-based study, even as they depart from its historical formation.

Herzog in Venice: Richard Stern's Stitch, Ezra Pound, and Jewish American Literary History

Herzog in Venice:Richard Stern's Stitch, Ezra Pound, and Jewish American Literary History Michael Kalisch (bio) I The impression one gets reading Zachary Leader's two-volume biography is that Saul Bellow never made a friend he didn't manage to fall out with (Leader, Life, vols. 1 & 2). The novelist Richard Stern was no exception, although, by Bellow's standards, their near half-century relationship was relatively plain sailing—one reason, perhaps, why Leader spends little time discussing it. The pair met in early 1956, shortly after Stern joined the English department at the University of Chicago, where he became the unofficial writer-in-residence, establishing a long-running undergraduate course in creative writing. (He retired as Helen A. Regenstein Professor of English and American Literature in 2001.) Stern earned his PhD from the University of Iowa in 1954, becoming, D. G. Myers notes, part of the first surge of Writers' Workshop graduates who "fanned out across the country to institute at least twenty-five new [writing] programs" (165). In the fall of '56, Stern invited Bellow to address his writing class, and the pair kept up a regular, intimate correspondence while Bellow was at work on Henderson the Rain King (1959)—which Stern praised in a write-up for the Kenyon Review— and Herzog (1964).1 Along with their mutual friend Edward Shils, Stern lobbied to bring Bellow to UChicago on a permanent basis; eventually, in 1962, Bellow accepted a position on the Committee on Social Thought, "something of an academic salon des refuses," Leader writes, and therefore a "better fit for him than the English Department" (Life, vol. 1, 615). Another of Bellow's biographers, Mark Harris, observes that Stern was "sober, reliable, immensely learned," and became "a friend of Bellow's stable side" once they were both settled in Hyde Park (36–37). The two writers offered "each other criticism and counsel in their trials and dilemmas," Bellow telephoning "the Sterns' house four or five times a day" (40). [End Page 266] On the afternoon that Bellow came to address Stern's writing class, in the fall of '56, the story to be discussed was not, as usual, that of a student, but of a young instructor on the English faculty, Philip Roth. Roth was just beginning to get his short stories published in university literary journals, but the piece Stern picked for the Bellow class had, Roth recalled, "been turned down by all the classy reviews" (qtd. in Pierpont 30). Roth sat quietly at the back of the room while Bellow, Stern, and the rest of the class workshopped "The Conversion of the Jews," which would appear in the Paris Review the following March before becoming part of Roth's National Book Award-winning first collection, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). Only after the class did Stern introduce the young writer to the famous novelist, a meeting that Roth would fictionalize in The Ghost Writer (1979).2 Bellow's support was a great boost to Roth's fledgling career—editions of Goodbye, Columbus still carry on their cover the opening line of Bellow's glowing and influential Commentary review—and the two gradually became friends.3 But it was Stern's early encouragement, and particularly his amusement at Roth's comic storytelling over their regular hamburger lunches together in Chicago, that may have been more important in guiding Roth's youthful ambition. "I wanted to be deep like Dostoyevsky. I wanted to write literature," Roth recalls, in a tribute to Stern after his death in 2013. "Instead I took Dick's advice and wrote Goodbye, Columbus. I would remain responsive to his literary wisdom forever after and would put before him, for him to challenge with his considerable critical vigor, the final draft of virtually all that I wrote" (Roth, "In Memory of Richard Stern"). The pair swapped manuscripts for forty years, commenting, often with ruthless honesty, upon each other's work; "we're so close that he reads my temperature from the progress of the manuscript," Stern said (Atlas 32). In their correspondence, Roth repeatedly quoted a favorite line from Blake that seemed to sum up their relationship: "Opposition is true friendship" (Roth, Letter to...

Through the Bay Window: Harriet Lane Levy's 920 O'Farrell Street as Modernist Memoir

This essay examines an understudied Jewish American autobiographical text, Harriet Lane Levy's memoir 920 O'Farrell Street (1947). Completed when she was eighty years old, the memoir uses modernist aesthetics to describe Levy's Jewish upbringing in late nineteenth-century San Francisco. Arguing that 920 O'Farrell Street fills a significant gap in Jewish American literary history, I consider Levy's modernist memoir as an alternative to the established Jewish American autobiographical tradition, which has privileged the stories of working-class immigrants making their way from the ghetto into mainstream America. As I demonstrate through close analysis of the memoir, and in particular Levy's use of the Victorian house as a structuring device, 920 O'Farrell Street expands the parameters of Jewish American literary history by mapping Jewishness to the geographic and architectural sites of turn-of-the-twentieth-century San Francisco, and displacing the ghetto as the sole locus of Jewish life and literature in the United States. Further, Jewish American literary scholarship's New York-centrism and its privileging of the ghetto tale have obscured the pivotal role played by California Jewish women in the early stages of the modernist movement. As a corrective, I preface my close reading of the memoir with background on Levy, placing her in the context of a group of remarkable women—including Gertrude Stein, an Oakland resident in her youth, and Alice B. Toklas, Levy's O'Farrell Street neighbor—who moved between the middle-class Jewish communities of northern California and the expatriate salons of Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Caribbean Jewish Crossings: Literary History and Creative Practice ed. by Sarah Phillips Casteel and Heidi Kaufman, and: The New Jewish American Literary Studies ed. Victoria Aarons

Reviewed by: Caribbean Jewish Crossings: Literary History and Creative Practice ed. by Sarah Phillips Casteel and Heidi Kaufman, and: The New Jewish American Literary Studies ed. Victoria Aarons Laura Arnold Leibman (bio) Caribbean Jewish Crossings: Literary History and Creative Practice. Edited by Sarah Phillips Casteel and Heidi Kaufman. University of Virginia Press, 2019. 352 pp. The New Jewish American Literary Studies. Edited by Victoria Aarons. Cambridge University Press, 2019. 242 pp. Since the publication of Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (2001) and Michael P. Kramer and Hana Wirth-Nesher's Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (2003), the field of American Jewish literature has changed dramatically not only in terms of how it is defined but also in methods used for interpreting that new diversity. Enter these recent essay collections. In Caribbean Jewish Crossings, editors Sarah Phillips Casteel and Heidi Kaufman shed light on Jewish life in the Caribbean through an analysis of literature from this region by and about Jews. The essays deliberately cross disciplinary borders, borrowing from history, art, and anthropology. In contrast, The New Jewish American Literary Studies as edited by Victoria Aarons takes a more theory-driven approach and self-consciously engages in a philosophical discussion of the goals and methods used in literary analysis. The different strategies speak to a more fundamental split in comparative literature and cultural studies. While both approaches are equally valid, Caribbean Jewish Crossings may prove more useful for those outside of literature departments. It is also the more radical in its implicit challenge to US-centered interpretations of "Americanness." The essays included in Caribbean Jewish Crossings take a broad approach to defining Jewish American literature. First, there is the location of the Caribbean itself. A key shift in Jewish American literary studies since 2001 has been a change in how "America" is understood. Caribbean Jewish Crossings rethinks both "America" and the methods used for interpreting that diversity. Prior to 1825, the largest Jewish communities in the Americas were all in the Caribbean, and for the first time, Caribbean Jewish Crossings provides an overview of what Caribbean Jews have contributed to American literary studies. Second, the volume sidesteps policing who or what is a Jew by embracing authors of Jewish [End Page 285] descent—regardless of their halachic status--as a way of thinking about Jewishness in the Caribbean as inherently cross-cultural. Third, and equally important, the volume balances analysis of writings by Jewish-descended people from the Caribbean with those by non-Jewish Caribbean authors who "have a long tradition of weaving together African and Diasporic narratives and, in the process, have identified or forged cultural and historical connections between them" (2). Methodologically, the volume is also interested in "critical ambivalences" as it moves between the vocabularies of Jewish and Caribbean studies (4). This ambivalence reflects the scholars' refusal to position Jews as solely victims or solely oppressors. This tactic is crucial, as it allows the essays to address both the impact of slavery and the Holocaust on Caribbean Jewish literature without privileging one over the other. In all of these arenas, the book functions as a case study of how scholars can rethink Jewish American literary history by thinking about American Jews—and American Jewish studies--as part of an intertwined, transnational nexus. Caribbean Jewish Crossings is divided into four sections. "The Emergence of Caribbean Jewish Literary Culture" begins in the second half of the eighteenth century in Suriname with an analysis of David Nassy's Essai historique (1788) by Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger. This essay points to the way that the volume willingly engages questions of how the definition of "literature" has changed across the centuries. "Revisiting the Inquisition and the Sephardic Caribbean" focuses on the inquisition, providing important ideas for how the Caribbean literature stands at the crossroads of Europe as well as North and South America. "Colonialism and Caribbean Holocaust Memory" uses writing both by and about Jews to decenter the Holocaust as a Jewish study by looking at how Jewish and Black diasporas intertwine. Compellingly, "Contemporary Voices: Narrative and Poetry" consists of a brief selection of contemporary literature by writers from a wide geographic range, including works translated from Dutch. The drawbacks...

A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History

A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History

A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History. Michael Hoberman

The title of Michael Hoberman’s A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History is inspired by Seymour “the Swede” Levov, the protagonist of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997), who, in that text, purchases “a hundred acres of America,” thus symbolizing a sense of belonging for himself and future generations. With this reference, Hoberman alludes to the sense of place—its presence, absence, meaning, and formative influence—that propels forward even as it roots the Jewish American literary imagination. Hoberman’s superb study extends from the 1850s to the new millennium. Considering the relationship of Jewish American writers to the land and geography they inhabit and shape (and that, in turn, shapes their identities), Hoberman navigates a delicate triangulation of Americanness, Jewishness, and Jewish Americanness. The richness of Hoberman’s work is partly a feature of its extensive chronology, which includes 150 years of literary history, and partly due to his...

A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History by Michael Hoberman

Reviewed by: A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History by Michael Hoberman Benjamin Schreier (bio) A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History By Michael Hoberman. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018. xii + 183 pp. In one sense Michael Hoberman's short, smart, and pithy new book addresses a fairly straightforward topic: "The subject of this book is the historical relationship between the Jewish American literary imagination and the sense of place" (2). Accordingly, it sets itself a fairly straightforward task: namely, as he writes toward the book's close, "The essays in the book represent my best attempt to explore the role that the geography of North America has played in shaping the Jewish American literary imagination" (155), or, as he describes that attempt toward the book's opening, to explore "the ways in which Jewish subjects have engaged the long-standing American tendency to contemplate and experience geography as a crucible for the formation of cultural identity" (2). And yet, as we see in this last formulation, there's something more at work in Hoberman's work: critical energies more profound than merely parochially straightforward. The book's great strength—and its offering to the field—is to provide a way to de-exceptionalize Jewish American literary study; for once we recognize the role of geography in Jewish American writing, once we appreciate its "territoriality," we recognize that it shares its ground with other American writing and literatures. To understand "geography as a basis for literary and cultural continuity" is to understand Jews in America as neither "oppressed outsiders" nor "excessively complacent recipients of American privilege" (4), but rather as Americans actively engaged in experiencing and writing like other Americans. [End Page 299] This represents a critically significant—and salutary—departure from the way the field has heretofore conceptualized itself (though "taken itself for granted" is probably more accurate, at least if you ask me). One of the historicist side effects of multiculturalist pluralism in the humanities is that it's frequently easy to think of ethnicity- or identity-based literatures as more or less discrete entities—with African American literature indexed to something more or less knowable as African American experience, Queer literature indexed to something more or less knowable as Queer experience, and so forth—and it's easy as well to eschew theorizing how those various siloed experiences and symptomatic literary formations interact with, overlap, or interdetermine each other (other than, maybe, some gestures toward a minoritarian idea of oppression). In Jewish American literary study this thought-formation is often intimately bound up with, and indeed inextricable from, a foundational sense that immigration is the only real theory the field needs—that is, that Jewish American literature essentially tracks the chronologically progressive history of Jewish immigration to the United States (thus do scholars preoccupy themselves with talk of literary generations, for example, or with how temporal distance from the scene of immigration determines the contours of the literary imagination of identity). But with its focus on geography rather than immigration, A Hundred Acres of America explicitly challenges this often-unacknowledged immigration theory of Jewish American literature. As Hoberman succinctly claims in the Introduction, "This book argues that a rich and complex relationship with American geography itself, and not merely the immigrant experience, constitutes a central reference point and touchstone for the development, over the course of several centuries, of a Jewish literary consciousness in the United States" (4). In chapters on frontier writing by Jews in early America, on late nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-twentieth-century intellectuals who emphasized the Jewish presence in colonial American cities (and who therefore substantiated claims both to the "cosmopolitan and pluralistic origins of America's oldest cities" [46] and "Jewish participation in early American history" [53]), on early- to mid-twentieth-century middlebrow and middle-American Jewish writers (in which writers [End Page 300] like Edna Ferber challenge our preconceived romantic notions of regionalism by representing small towns as continuous with "other American environments" [78]), on late-twentieth-century Jewish writers' contestations of the pastoral mode, on turn-of-the-twenty-firstcentury literary returns to the shtetl...

A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History by Michael Hoberman

A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History by Michael Hoberman

Michael Hoberman's A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History

Michael Hoberman's A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History

The History of Jewish American Literary History: A Critical Genealogy of Emergence

Abstract This article takes the cliché of Jewish American literary breakthrough in the late 1950s as an opportunity to examine the perverse professional legibility of the Jewish American literary field: everyone knows about it, but few scholars outside the field take it seriously according to the reigning canons of scholarly importance. If early critics of the Jewish American literary field celebrated this emergence, its ethic of assimilation was starkly at odds with an increasingly influential multiculturalism, even as these critics relied on an implicit multicultural logic in justifying the field. A critical exploration of this paradox—and a critical genealogy of how the field got to this point—shows how the marginalization of Jewish American literary study in the contemporary academy reveals an important story about the origin and development of a currently dominant concept of identity in the humanities, even as it reveals how the Jewish American literary field continues to operate in the shadow of this cliché.

The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History by Benjamin Schreier

The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History by Benjamin Schreier

The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History. Benjamin Schreier

The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History. Benjamin Schreier

Parking the Ark in Niagara Falls: Mordecai Manuel Noah and the Imposition of Meaning in Jewish American Literary History

Parking the Ark in Niagara Falls: Mordecai Manuel Noah and the Imposition of Meaning in Jewish American Literary History

Mapping Jewish American Literary Studies in the New Century

Mapping Jewish American Literary Studies in the New Century

The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History

The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2016

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources — 2020 Brittany Hirth (bio) The following is a bibliography of Philip Roth-related texts published during 2020 including books, book chapters, and journal and magazine articles. Individual essays included in books not solely centered on Roth are grouped in “Book Chapters” and are cross-listed according to MLA style. The final section lists a few notable essays. Digital book editions, such as those designed for Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s Nook readers, are not included in this listing, but they can be easily accessed online. Brittany Hirth Brittany Hirth is an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Arts and Letters at Dickinson State University, where she teaches twentieth century and contemporary American literature. She has published articles on Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Anthony Swofford. BOOKS O’Brien, Dan. Fine Meshwork: Philip Roth, Edna O’Brien, and Jewish-Irish Literature. Syracuse UP, 2020. Google Scholar Taylor, Benjamin. My Friendship with Philip Roth. Penguin, 2020. Google Scholar BOOK CHAPTERS Baumgarten, Murray. “Philip Roth, Jewish Identity, and the Satire of Modern Success.” History and Literature: New Readings of Jewish Texts in Honor of Arnold J. Band, edited by William Cutter and David C. Jacobson, Brown Judaic Studies, 2020, pp. 289–300. Google Scholar Brauner, David. “‘Being Jewish’: Philip Roth, Antisemitism and the Holocaust.” Howard Jacobson, Manchester UP, 2020, pp. 141–97. Google Scholar Coste, Jacques-Henri. “Revisiting Business History through Capitalist Fiction: The Glove-Making Industry in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral.” The Fictions of American Capitalism: Working Fictions and the Economic Novel, edited by Jacques-Henri Coste and Vincent Dussol, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 297–317. Google Scholar D’Alfonso, Francesca. “Philip Roth e la fenomenologia della paura: per una lettura del romanzo Nemesis.” Oltre la pandemia: Società, salute, economia e regole nell’era post Covid-19, vol. 1, edited by Gianmaria Palmieri, Editoriale Scientifica, 2020, pp. 781–91. Google Scholar Eaton, Mark. “Secular Theodicy: Saul Bellow, E.L. Doctorow, and Philip Roth.” Religion and American Literature since 1950, Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 161–99. Google Scholar Hadar, David. “Negotiating Continuity: Writing about Philip Roth in Israel.” Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature, Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 127–41. Google Scholar Kellman, Steven G. “Four Score and Philip Roth.” Rambling Prose: Essays, Trinity UP, 2020, pp. 126–33. Google Scholar Kirsh, Adam. “Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth.” The Blessing and the Curse: The Jewish People and Their Books in the Twentieth Century, Norton, 2020, pp. 112–22. Google Scholar Lambert, Josh, Rachel Gordan, Benjamin Schreier, Bettina Hoffman, and Julian Levinson. “Four Approaches to Teaching Goodbye, Columbus.” Teaching Jewish American Literature, edited by Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel Rubinstein, MLA, 2020, pp. 317–27. Google Scholar Maxey, Ruth. “Creating a Usable Past: Writing the Korean War in Contemporary American Fiction.” 21st Century US Historical Fiction: Contemporary Responses to the Past, edited by Ruth Maxey, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 149–69. Google Scholar Mitchell, Kaye. “The Shame of Being a Man: Humiliation and/as Heroism.” Writing Shame: Gender, Contemporary Literature and Negative Affect, edited by Kaye Mitchell, Edinburgh UP, 2020, pp. 199–244. Google Scholar Nell, Werner. “Überschaubare Nachbarschaft? Religion, Macht und Sexualität in der Kleinstadt: Eine Adoleszenz-Erzählung von Heinrich Böll mit einem Blick auf Philip Roth.” Kleinstadtliteratur: Erkundungen eines Imaginationsraums ungleichzeitiger Moderne, edited by Werner Nell and Marc Weiland, transcript, 2020, pp. 347–72. Google Scholar Peleg, Yaron. “Writing New Kinds of Jews: A Course in Literary Genetics and Masculinity.” Teaching Jewish American Literature, edited by Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel Rubinstein, MLA, 2020, pp. 183–89. Google Scholar Schreier, Benjamin. “Introduction: What’s the ‘History’ in ‘Jewish American Literary History’ the History Of?” The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity, U of Pennsylvania P, 2020, pp. 1–36. Google Scholar Shostak, Debra. “The Father in the Apocalyptic Imagination — Part Two: Politics and 9/11.” Fictive Fathers in the Contemporary American Novel, Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 171–96. Google Scholar ———. “Middle-Class America at Mid-Century.” Fictive Fathers in the Contemporary American Novel, Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 51–92. Google Scholar Wasserman, Sarah. “Counterhistory, Counterfact, Counterobject: Philip K...

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2015

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2015 Compiled by Mike Witcombe What follows is a bibliography of Philip Roth-related texts published during 2015, including critical works (books, book chapters, journal essays, and special journal issues). All entries will reflect the format as defined in the third edition of the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing (2008). All sources are arranged in alphabetical order according to the author’s last name. Individual essays included in edited collections are grouped in “Book Chapters” and are cross-listed according to MLA style. Digital book editions, such as those designed for Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s Nook readers, are not included in this listing. Given the recent growth in e-book technology, digital versions of Roth’s texts are becoming standard practice. This being the case, none of these e-book versions are included in this bibliography. Readers and researchers can easily visit online booksellers to find digital editions. BOOKS The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Eds. Basu, Ann. States of Trial—Manhood in Philip Roth’s America. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Print. Kaplan, Brett Ashley. Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Print. EDITED COLLECTIONS AND SPECIAL ISSUES Koy, Christopher E., Ed. “The Worldliness of Philip Roth.” Special issue of Litteraria Pragensia: Studies in Literature and Culture 25:49 (2015). Print. BOOK CHAPTERS Aarons, Vicki. “The Making of American Jewish Identities in Postwar American Fiction.” The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Eds. Brauner and Stähler 43-53. Print. [End Page 111] Batnitzky, Leora. “Beyond Theodicy? Joban Themes in Philip Roth’s Nemesis.” The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics, Hermeneutics. Eds. Leora Batnitzky and Ilona Pardes. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH. 2015. 213-24. Print. Budick, Emily Miller. “Ghostwriting the Holocaust: The Ghost Writer, The Diary, The Kindly Ones, and Me.” The Subject of Holocaust Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2015. 19-36. Print. Furst, Lilian R. “Ritualized Bellyaching: Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.” Just Talk: Narratives of Psychotherapy. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2015. 57-70. Print. Löffler, Philipp. “‘A Singular Act of Invention’: Storytelling, Pluralism, and Philip Roth’s American Trilogy.” Pluralist Desires: Contemporary Historical Fiction and the End of the Cold War. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2015. 97-126. Print. Mosher, Paul W. and Jeffrey Berman. “Angry Acts and Counteracts in Philip Roth’s Life and Art.” Confidentiality and its Discontents: Dilemmas of Privacy in Psychotherapy. New York: Fordham UP, 2015. 82-104. Print. _______. “The Angry Act: The Psychoanalyst’s Breach of Confidentiality in Philip Roth’s Life and Art.” Confidentiality and its Discontents: Dilemmas of Privacy in Psychotherapy. New York: Fordham UP, 2015. 63-81. Print. Osmanović, Sabina. “Dealing with Evanescence: The Motif of Old Age and the Crisis of Meaning in Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal.” Mapping the World of Anglo-American Studies at the Turn of the Century. Eds. Aleksandra Nikčević-Batrićević and Marija Krivokapić. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2015. 175-81. Print. Pozorski, Aimee. “American Jewish Life Writing, Illness and the Ethics of Innovation.” The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Eds. Brauner and Stähler 43-53. Print. Scanlan, Margaret. “Strange Times to Be a Jew: Alternative History After 9/11.” Narrating 9/11: Fantasies of State, Security, and Terrorism. Eds. John Duvall and Robert Marzec. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins UP, 2015. 168-93. Print. Schreier, Benjamin. “Why Jews Aren’t Normal: The Unrepresentable Future of Philip Roth’s The Counterlife.” The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History. New York: New York UP, 2015. 149-84. Print. Segal, Lynne. “The Circus of (male) Ageing: Philip Roth and the Perils of Masculinity.” Psychosocial Imaginaries: Perspectives on Temporality, Subjectivities and Activism. Ed. Stephen Frosh. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 87-104. Print. Tandon, Bharat. “Philip Roth’s Kinds of Writing.” Writing for the New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical. Ed. Fiona Green. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Web. JOURNAL ARTICLES AND ESSAYS Anténe, Petr. “Racial Conflicts in the Campus Novel of the Early 2000s: Philip Roth’s The Human Stain and...

Impossible Jew: identity and the reconstruction of Jewish American literary history

Impossible Jew: identity and the reconstruction of Jewish American literary history