TY - JOUR
T1 - The history of jewish American literary history
T2 - A critical genealogy of emergence
AU - Schreier, Benjamin
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 by Duke University Press.
Copyright:
Copyright 2019 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
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U2 - 10.1215/00029831-7335373
DO - 10.1215/00029831-7335373
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:85063514662
VL - 91
SP - 121
EP - 150
JO - American literature; a journal of literary history, criticism and bibliography
JF - American literature; a journal of literary history, criticism and bibliography
SN - 0002-9831
IS - 1
ER -