Research Catalog

A house of words : Jewish writing, identity and memory

Title: A house of words : Jewish writing, identity and memory / Norman Ravvin.
Author: Ravvin, Norman, 1963-
Publication: Montreal : McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	PR120.J48 R38 1997g	Off-site

Description

191 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

Focusing on the way Jewish history - particularly the Holocaust - and tradition inform post-war Canadian and American Jewish literature, A House of Words offers innovative readings of the works of such influential writers as Saul Bellow, Leonard Cohen, Eli Mandel, Mordecai Richler, Chava Rosenfarb, Philip Roth, and Nathanael West.
Norman Ravvin highlights the concerns that these disparate writers share as Jewish writers, as well as placing their work in the context of the broader traditions of multiculturalism, post-colonial writing, and critical theory. At once scholarly and poetic, A House of Words will appeal to the general reader of Canadian, American, and Jewish literature and history, as well as to specialists in these fields.

Subject

Bibliography (note)

Contents

Introduction: This World and Others -- Pt. 1. What Sort of Home is the Past? -- Forethought: Building a House of Words. 1. Eli Mandel's Family Architecture: Building a House of Words on the Prairies. 2. Writing around the Holocaust: Uncovering the Ethical Centre of Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers. 3. Taking the Victims' Side: Mordecai Richler's Response to the Holocaust in St. Urbain's Horseman -- Pt. 2. Strange Presences -- Forethought: Facing Up to the Past. 4. Strange Presences on the Family Tree: The Unacknowledged Literary Father in Philip Roth's The Prague Orgy. 5. Philip Roth's Literary Ghost: Rereading Anne Frank. 6. Ghost Writing: Chava Rosenfarb's The Tree of Life -- Pt. 3. Confronting Apocalypse -- Forethought: On Refusing to End. 7. Apocalypse Stalled: The Role of Traditional Archetype and Symbol in Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust. 8. An End to Endings: Saul Bellow's Anti-Apocalyptic Novel -- Pt. 4. The Collaborator.
9. Warring with Shadows: The Holocaust and the Academy. Conclusion: In Search of a Multicultural Tradition.

ISBN

LCCN

cn 97900546

OCLC

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries