Holocaust impiety in Jewish American literature : : memory, identity, (post) postmodern / / by Joost Krijnen.

• Superior document: Postmodern Studies, Volume 53
• VerfasserIn: Krijnen, Joost,
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden, [Netherlands] ;, Boston, [Massachusetts] : : Brill Rodopi,, 2016.; ©2016
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Series: Postmodern studies ; Volume 53.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (249 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

The Holocaust is often said to be unrepresentable. Yet since the 1990s, a new generation of Jewish American writers have been returning to this history again and again, insisting on engaging with it in highly playful, comic, and “impious” ways. Focusing on the fiction of Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, and Nathan Englander, this book suggests that this literature cannot simply be dismissed as insensitive or improper. It argues that these Jewish American authors engage with the Holocaust in ways that renew and ensure its significance for contemporary generations. These ways, moreover, are intricately connected to efforts of finding new means of expressing Jewish American identity, and of moving beyond the increasingly apparent problems of postmodernism.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material -- Introduction: Ever After Auschwitz: Holocaust Piety, Impiety, and Jewish American Fiction -- Historical Consciousness and the Americanization of the Holocaust -- The Dynamic of Distance: The Memory of the Holocaust in Everything Is Illuminated, The History of Love, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier … Clay -- Jewish American Identity and the Holocaust -- Inventing Jewish Worlds: Identity, History, and the Holocaust in Everything Is Illuminated, The History of Love, The Ministry of Special Cases, and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union -- Cultivating the Desert: Pragmatist Reconfigurations of Postmodernism -- Post-Postmodern “Entertainment”: The Holocaust and Renewalism in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier … Clay, Everything Is Illuminated, The History of Love, and Great House -- Afterword: An American Story -- Bibliography -- Index.