Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity

Benjamin Schreier argues that the breakthrough of Jewish American writers in the 1950s is the critically originary moment of Jewish American literary study, but its legibility is still overwhelmingly grounded in a reliance on a single ethnological narrative. He interrogates professionally powerful assumptions about Jewish American literary history and offers a critical genealogy of breakthrough and other narratives through which Jewish Studies has asserted its self-evidence. This has broad implications for the reconceptualization of Jewish and other identity-based ethnic studies.

Format: Hardback
Length: 224 pages
Publication date: 16 October 2020
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Benjamin Schreier contends that the breakthrough cliché, which refers to the entrance of Jewish American authors like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley into the American cultural scene in the 1950s, must also be considered the moment of critical origin in Jewish American literary study. Schreier argues that this is the foundational scene of the Jewish American literary field, the point at which the field continually repeats and replays in order to establish itself as a more or less formalized academic discipline. More than sixty years later, the field's legibility, or the very condition of its possibility, remains overwhelmingly reliant on this singular ethnological narrative. In a controversial critique of the field's unexamined foundations and stagnant state, Schreier questions a series of widely held assumptions about Jewish American literary history. He offers a critical genealogy of breakthrough and other narratives through which Jewish Studies has asserted its compelling self-evidence, not simply under the banner of the historical realities Jewish Studies claims to represent but more fundamentally for the intellectual and institutional structures through which it produces these representations. He demonstrates how a historicist scholarly narrative quickly consolidated and became hegemonic, in part due to its double articulation of a particular American subject and of a transnational historiography that categorically identified that subject as Jewish. The ethnological grounding of the Jewish American literary field is no longer tenable, according to Schreier, in an argument with broad implications.

Weight: 504g
Dimension: 159 x 235 x 22 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780812252576