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Diasporic Dilemmas: Jewish American Identities, Genre Fictions and Double Structures of Collective Memory in the Literary Writing of Michael Chabon (Dissertation Project)

Dissertation in Literature

Mentoring team:
First supervisor: Prof. Dr. Ulla Haselstein
Second supervisor: Prof. Dr. Frank Kelleter
Third supervisor: Prof. Dr. Andrew Gross

Following a period of a supposed“ whitening” of American Jews, the last two decades have seen an expanding interest in the Jewish American Community in exploring distinctive Jewish traditions and in reconceiving American Jews as a diasporic ethnic minority. This striking shift towards discourses of Jewish history and identity, sometimes even referred to as a contemporary “Jewish literary renaissance”, is perhaps most prominently reflected in the novels of Michael Chabon – above all in his Pulitzer Prize winning 2000 novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and his 2007 The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

The previous scholarly debate on these recent articulations of Jewish difference, as well as on Chabon’s writing in particular, has tended to take a dichotomous approach that focuses on the question whether these texts are “authentic” or “merely symbolic” representations of Jewishness.

It is the premise of my dissertation project, however, that Chabon’s novels include both the ‘authentic’ and the ‘constructed’ dimensions of contemporary Jewish American articulations of identity, and that we therefore need to read Chabon’s work through a double lens that registers the texts’ constructive and deconstructive tendencies vis-à-vis collective memory and diasporic Jewish identity. In my dissertation I intend to examine how in Chabon’s work – mainly in the texts of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – not only different temporalities and literary genres, but also different cultural histories as well as different forms of masculinity constantly compete with each other, with the surprising and paradoxical result that the authenticity of each register is subverted at the same time that it is affirmed.

Articles

1/2017     “‘Freedom-from’ versus ‘Freedom-to’: A Dialectical Reading of David Foster
Wallace`s Infinite Jest.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol. 65, no. 1, 2017, pp. 51-65.

Conference Papers

7/2016      “The Material Unconscious: On the Reinterpretation of American Pop Cultural Archives as Transnational Jewish Memory in the Novels of Michael Chabon.” Re-Framing American Jewish History and Thought: New Transnational Perspectives. School of Jewish Theology, University of Potsdam.