Abstract
This special issue, as its title suggests, considers some of the processes by which Jewish writers shaped literary modernism, and the intricate ways modernism was in turn shaped by its figurings of Jews and Jewishness. Although analysis of the political and aesthetic work Jewishness performs for modernist literature is beginning to make its way into studies of modernist negotiations with race, culture, and religion, it is still primarily seen as a side-topic within such inquiries, something to be explored only by those with a “special interest” in Jewish studies. This compartmentalization causes critics to miss the importance of Jewishness as a category through which American, British, and continental modernist writers engaged with racial and cultural difference. In fact, it has been persuasively argued that writers working in various modes of modernist literary production relied on Jewishness to help establish their artistic and political slants. In her discussion of modern American poetry, for example, Rachel Blau DuPlessis asserts that “[f]or both Jews and non-Jews, the imaginary Jew. . . played a rich ideological bogey-role and helped provoke and solidify the articulation of a Christianized high modernism” (141). I would add that alongside the high modernist use of Jews as foils, modernist interventions into prevailing antisemitici discourses (by, among non-Jewish writers, Joyce, Jean Rhys, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Auden, and others, and by various Jewish writers) helped form alternative, more inclusive and often Left-leaning conceptions of modernism as well. Indeed, as Bryan Cheyette boldly argues, Jews provide a “key touchstone for the racial boundaries of European ‘culture’ and the ‘Englishness’ of modern English literature. Semitism lies at the indeterminate ‘centre’ of many of the texts which make up the received literary canon” (Constructions 12).
Date of this Version
2005
Recommended Citation
Linett, Maren, "Modernism’s Jews / Jewish Modernisms: Introduction" (2005). Department of English Faculty Publications. Paper 11.
https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/englpubs/11
Comments
This is the author-accepted manuscript of Linett, M. (2005). Introduction: Modernism's Jews/Jewish Modernisms. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 51(2), 249-257. Copyright Johns Hopkins University Press, the version of record is available at DOI 10.1353/mfs.2005.0044.