New directions in Jewish American fiction.

In New Directions in Jewish American Fiction I argue that Jewish American writers have unwittingly performed a social and literary function for American culture not unlike the communal responsibilities entrusted to rabbinic figures during the outset of the Babylonian exile and whose discussions and stories became the Talmud. Previous studies of Jewish American fiction have all but ignored theological and spiritual concerns, tending to group writers based solely on ethnic origins and sociological constructs. In contrast, I propose a new cultural and narratological paradigm based upon traditional textual Jewish civilization and culture, both Biblical and Talmudic. I argue that my paradigm is a central and heretofore unexplored component necessary for understanding and analyzing the condition of Jewish American writers and their fiction within American culture. My theological paradigm confronts Jewish American writers' treatment of the rupture of immigrant acculturation in the first half of the twentieth century, and charts the ways in which theologically based Jewish American writers---for example Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth---in an attempt to retrieve a lost culture and literary legacy, have responded to and represented the Holocaust in their work. Concurrently, I account for the creation of what I term a Neo-Orthodoxy in the work of contemporary Jewish American feminist novelists Rebecca Goldstein and Allegra Goodman. Finally, my project locates a Liturgical Literature , an imaginative literature centrally Jewish in its concerns and characterized by a fresh midrashic mode, in the late twentieth-century work of Cynthia Ozick and Henry Roth.Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2002.School code: 0146