Writing ethnicity/writing modernity: Autobiographies by Jewish-American women.
Item
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Title
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Writing ethnicity/writing modernity: Autobiographies by Jewish-American women.
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Identifier
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AAI9304736
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identifier
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9304736
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Creator
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Shollar, Barbara.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Jane Marcus
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Date
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1992
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Women's Studies | Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies | Literature, Slavic and East European
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Abstract
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The thesis introduces the scope and substance of the study as part of a multi-cultural practice and frames it as a rhetorical and historical mode of inquiry. Jewish-American women's autobiography is an ideological genre that represents the modernity of their writers' lives or, conversely, inscribes the new lives ethnic women were creating for themselves into the definitions of modernity and literary modernism. The work by the Russian-Jewish Bella Chagall originally written in Yiddish serves as an "old-world" contrast to the "new world" versions represented in the texts of Mary Antin and Elizabeth Gertrude Stern; the thesis argues that Chagall's choice of "the mother tongue" determines the structure and tropes of the text. Her text replaces the patriarchal liturgy with an alternative matrilineal heritage in its re-presentation of a specifically female spiritual calendar/women's time. Antin and Stern refashioned this Yiddish heritage into gendered ethnicity. Chapter 2 argues for a more complex reading of Mary Antin's The Promised Land than critics have given it, defining a geographical poetics as the basis for mediating between the claims of individualism and the demands of collectivity. Chapter 3, devoted to Stern, shows the Jewish-American women's autobiography as a guide not merely to assimilation but to bourgeois acculturation, with its implications for making oneself over and over. This capacity for infinite renovation is evidenced in part by Stern's writing two different versions of her life, in which the text of one undoes, repudiates, or otherwise complicates the other. Rebekah Kohut and Hannah Solomon specifically sought to rewrite the role previously designated for women within Jewish religion at the same time that, to varying degrees, they rewrote Jewish religion from a feminist perspective. The chapters devoted to them show the relationship of their texts to masculinist theological writings representing women as well as to those texts representing women within secular progressivism. (Jane Addams's Hull House is used as an exemplary comparative text for the latter.) Pauline Leader rewrites autobiography according to modernist rules while exemplifying the ethnic sources of modernism and reflecting the differences that gender and class make in its re-presentation.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
