One and the same openness: Narrative and tradition in contemporary Jewish American literature.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the ways in which contemporary Jewish American authors rewrite traditional Jewish narratives to both reflect and revise current conceptions of the self and the Jew. Far from denying a connection to Jewish tradition, these authors instead shift the focus, articulating a Jewishness that has less to do with their conception of a specifically revealed will of God than with their desire to integrate inherited stories with those emerging from contemporary Jewish life. I argue that the texts being granted authority have changed, expanded to include narratives of collective memory that stand outside of the sacred canon but nevertheless retain both causal and normative roles in the construction of contemporary Jewish identity. I suggest that the texts examined in this study work individually to challenge received notions of tradition and identity; together, they exhibit a shared faith in storytelling as both a metaphor for self-invention and a means of connecting them to a Jewish narrative past. The first chapter considers the relationship between feminism and narrative in Grace Paley's short fiction, arguing that for Paley, the act of storytelling is a sign of literary and Jewish authority, as well as a form of political action. The second chapter contends that by reworking the Jewish legend of the golem to allow for female creation, Cynthia Ozick (in Puttermesser and Xanthippe) and Marge Piercy (in He, She and It) speak to perceived gender inequities within Judaism while still maintaining that traditional narratives can fruitfully inform contemporary female identity. Through an examination of Jerome Badanes' The Final Opus of Leon Solomon and Art Spiegelman's Maus, the third chapter argues that contemporary Holocaust narratives pursue questions of aesthetic boundaries and the legitimacy of artistic expression in light of the tension between the need to bear witness and the impossibility of doing so in figurative language. Finally, the last chapter furthers the question of Jewish authorial responsibility through a discussion of Philip Roth's representations of Israel in The Counterlife and Operation Shylock. The figure of the authorial double--and, by extension, the doubling of voices as a rhetorical strategy--allows Roth to challenge American myths of nationality, as well as traditional Jewish narrative patterns of exile and return.