By way of a brief genealogy of the Jewish American literary field and through the lens of recent attempts to imagine how comparative literature-based thinking about a concept of “world literature” can be critically productive for Jewish literary study, this article analyzes Jewish American literary studies’ prestige problem. Because it has persistently failed to theorize the intellectual and methodological assumptions underlying its practice, Jewish American literary study remains burdened by the essentialist implications of an ethnological historicism. This article ultimately argues that Jewish American literary study needs to take more seriously the possibilities offered by a materialist epistemology rather than the Jewish studies-based historicist ontology it has mostly taken for granted. “My hope is that a Jewish American epistemology can operate outside the penumbra of a tired and played-out concept of ethnicity—a term that unavoidably, if spectrally, posits a biologistic object at the heart of its historicist project—even as it might still claim the mantle of Jewish-y-ness.”
This article challenges an influential historicism in Jewish American literary study that takes for granted that Jewish American literature is primarily representational. This kind of historicism inevitably links into a nationalist project to secure (that is, by assuming) a specifically Jewish subject formation that would unify all historical expressions of Jewish culture. Through a rereading of Philip Roth's "Goodbye, Columbus" but with reference across his oeuvre, this article argues that the primary drama in Roth's fiction is the failure of available terms and paradigms to express Jewish identification compellingly. It is not that Roth's characters do not want to be Jews; it is that they do not know how to describe themselves as Jews. The article makes a case for revisioning Jewish American literary study as primarily critical, as displacing the positive subject representational historicism expects to find in it.
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