• “The Miracle”, “How I found America”, “Wings”, “Hunger”, “The Fat of the Land”, in Anzia Yezierska, Hungry Hearts, Boston & New York, Houghton Mifflin 1920.
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/yezierska/hearts/hearts.html
• Saul Bellow, Herzog, London, Penguin 2001;
• Bernard Malamud, The Assistant, London, Penguin 1967;
• Philip Roth, American Pastoral, New York, Vintage 1997;
• “The Pagan Rabbi” in Cynthia Ozick, The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories. Syracuse University Press, 1995.
Criticism:
Simona Porro. “‘My One Story is Hunger’: il languore metafisico delle protagoniste di Anzia Yezierska”. ALTRE MODERNITÀ vol. 13, 2015, p. 1-14.
Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky. “Philip Roth and American Jewish Identity: the Question of Authenticity”. American Literary History, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Spring 2001), pp. 79-107.
Sandra Kumamoto Stanley. “Mourning the Greatest Generation. Myth and History in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral”. Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Spring 2005), pp. 1-24;
Beverly Gross. “Bellow's Herzog”. Chicago Review, Vol. 17, No. 2/3, New Chicago Writing and Art (1964), pp. 217-221;
Matthew C. Roudane and Saul Bellow. “An Interview with Saul Bellow”. Contemporary Literature, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Autumn, 1984), pp. 265-28;
Walter Shear, “Culture Conflict in 'The Assistant'”. The Midwest Quarterly, Vol. VII, No. 4, Summer, 1966, pp. 367-80;
Edward A. Abramson. “Bernard Malamud and the Jews: An Ambiguous Relationship”. The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 24, Ethnicity and Representation in American Literature (1994), pp.146-156;
Simona Porro, “L’America come seconda Yavneh? Cynthia Ozick e la rinascenza ebraica statunitense degli anni Settanta del Novecento”. IPERSTORIA. Vol. IX, 2017, pp. 246-255.
Christina Dokuou and Daniel Walden. “The Pagan Condemnation and Orthodox Redemption of Rabbi Isaac Kornfeld”. Studies in American Jewish Literature, Vol. 15, 1996, pp. 6-16.
Learning Objectives
The aims of the course are the following:
a) to introduce students to Jewish-American literature
b) to provide students with an in-depth knowledge of the aforementioned literary and cultural phenomenon
c) to promote the development of the students' critical awareness of the literary and cultural dynamics involved in the aforementioned phenomenon.
Prerequisites
The prerequisites for the admission to the course are those established by the Corso di Laurea in Lingue e Letterature Europee e Americane
Teaching Methods
Lectures and interactive lessons.
Further information
Students can major in American literature 1 only if they have already taken classes for 18 CFU. For all the others, it is an elective course.
Type of Assessment
Oral exam with written pre-test.
Course program
The first part of the course focuses on the definition of Jewish American literature. This preliminary part will be followed by an in-depth examination of the first Jewish authors in the U.S, i.e. those immigrants from Eastern Europe who made it their mission to assimilate into the cultural mainstream at a high personal and psychological cost. In that respect, the focus will be on Anzia Yezierska.
We will then follow the evolution of the Jewish authors in the U. S. from a state of marginality to the center of American culture, a phenomenon which started after World War II, thanks to the generation of intellectuals called the "New York Intellectuals", a group of Jewish critics and academics who edited important literary magazines that put Jewish culture in the national spotlight. We will therefore proceed to analyze the literary production of the three "titans" Malamud, Bellow, and Philip Roth, whose novels not only made it into the American canon but, actually, BECAME the canon. Given this extraordinarily successful assimilation of Jewish literature into the literary and cultural mainstream, some critics, such as Irving Howe, predicted the imminent end of Jewish American literature, a phenomenon which, from their viewpoint, had always been closely associated with the immigration experience, and with a condition of ethnic marginality in the nation. From Howe’s perspective, the generations of writers coming after the aforementioned "titans", having no firsthand experience of immigration and/or of cultural marginality, would not be able to produce "genuine" Jewish American literature. Yet, as authors such as Cynthia Ozick have demonstrated, this prediction proved to be wrong. The 1970s saw, in fact, a revitalization of Jewish American literature, thanks to a literary and cultural movement called “Jewish Renaissance”. This movement was marked by a rediscovery of the religious roots of Judaism as the key factor in the continuity of a tradition that has been more than once on the brink of dissolution