Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Religious Studies
First Advisor
Stern, Eliyahu
Abstract
This dissertation offers a new theory of the relationship between Jewish literature and Jewish identity in European modernity. Taking up the perennially troubling case of literary modernism, I argue that Jewish writers reject the reproductive logics of Jewish identity politics by theorizing a literary mode of relationality. I term this mode of relationality aesthetic afterlife. This concept refuses the figures of blood, descent, and race that dominate Jewish identity discourse in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Amid a biopolitical imaginary that privileges the legibility of Jewish bodies as the sign of Jewish collective vitality and continuity, Jewish modernists celebrate the opaque and artificial elements of the body’s stylization. Moreover, by positing a metonymic relationship between the stylized body and aestheticized text, Jewish modernists present literature as an encounter with spectral vitality that exceeds the representation. Jewish modernist texts thematize the disappearance of the author and their world as the generative source of a vitality that resists reproduction, inviting the reader to form themselves around this loss: in this way, the refusal of Jewish continuity is the aesthetic afterlife of Jewish literature. While scholars have tended to focus on Jewish literature as a medium of historical representation, Secrets of Inheritance pushes us to specify how literary texts mediate relations in and beyond their own historical context. Through the fiction, poetry, and criticism of Marcel Proust (1871-1923), Anna Margolin (1887-1952), Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), and Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928), I traverse divisions of national and linguistic context to elucidate Jewish modernism’s aesthetic critique of Jewish reproduction. Across these modernist texts, I focus on three overlapping modes of aesthetic afterlife: the death of the author, direct address to the reader, and the generativity of nothingness. Across the chapters of this project, these textual inscriptions of death, loss, and lack mark the limits of a Jewish identity politics rooted in reproducing a Jewish body. Through close readings attentive to style and form, I offer aesthetic afterlife as an index for how Jewish literature not only represents questions of Jewish identity, but also engenders identity trouble for its readers. As continuity and sovereignty remain the brutal watchwords of Jewish politics, the aesthetic afterlife of Jewish modernism is as contemporary as ever. By theorizing the generative negativity of Jewish literature’s retort to Jewish continuity, Secrets of Inheritance calls for Jewish literary study to reimagine its critical engagement with Jewish identity and its discontents.
Recommended Citation
Goldstein, Evan, "Secrets of Inheritance: Modernism and the Afterlives of Jewish Literature" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1503.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1503
