A house of words : Jewish writing, identity and memory / / Norman Ravvin

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910823744903321
• Autore: Ravvin Norman <1963->
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Montreal ; ; Buffalo, : McGill-Queen's University Press, c1997
• ISBN: 1-282-85474-7; 9786612854743; 0-7735-6684-8
• Edizione: [1st ed.]
• Descrizione fisica: x, 191 p. : ill. ; ; 24 cm
• Collana: McGill-Queen's studies in ethnic history. Series two
• Disciplina: 813/.54098924
• Soggetti: American fiction - Jewish authors - History and criticism; American fiction - 20th century - History and criticism; Jews in literature; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Includes index.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. [177]-187) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Front Matter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Illustrations -- Introduction: This World and Others -- What Sort of Home Is the Past? -- Forethought: Building a House of Words -- Eli Mandel’s Family Architecture: Building a House of Words on the Prairies -- Writing around the Holocaust: Uncovering the Ethical Centre of Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers -- Taking the Victims’ Side: Mordecai Richler’s Response to the Holocaust in St. Urbain’s Horseman -- Strange Presences -- Forethought: Facing Up to the Past -- Strange Presences on the Family Tree: The Unacknowledged Literary Father in Philip Roth’s The Prague Orgy -- Philip Roth’s Literary Ghost: Rereading Anne Frank -- Ghost Writing: Chava Rosenfarb’s The Tree of Life -- Confronting Apocalypse -- Forethought: On Refusing to End -- Apocalypse Stalled: The Role of Traditional Archetype and Symbol in Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust -- An End to Endings: Saul Bellow’s Anti-Apocalyptic Novel -- The Collaborator -- Forethought -- Warring with Shadows: The Holocaust and the Academy -- Conclusion: In Search of a Multicultural Tradition -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
• Sommario/riassunto: Arguing that Jewish North American writing is too commonly discussed ; as part of the mainstream, neglecting the Jewish aspects of the works, Ravvin places the writing of Bellow, Richler, Cohen, West, Mandel, Roth, and Rosenfarb within the Jewish context that the works demand. Ravvin depicts a Jewish cultural landscape within which postwar writers contend with community and identity, continuity and loss, and highlights the way this particular landscape is entangled with broader literary and cultural traditions. He considers Bellow and West alongside apocalyptic narratives, discusses Cohen in relation to the counterculture, examines Mandel's postmodern view of history, and looks at autobiography and ethics in Roth and Rosenfarb. At once scholarly and poetic, A House of Words will appeal to the general reader of Canadian, American, and Jewish literature and history, as well as to specialists in these fields.