Against the Dialectic of Nation
Against the Dialectic of Nation
Abraham Cahan and Desire’s Spectral Jew
This chapter articulates a literary historical legitimation for critiquing the legibility and circulation of Jewish categoricalness. Through a close reading of Abraham Cahan's novella “The Imported Bridegroom,” it envisions an identity-based literary critical practice that seeks its authorization from a future of identification about which it remains uncertain. It shows how Cahan's text undermines a certain kind of literary history that expects to find in Jewish American literature the secure representation of a Jewish American subject it wants to recognize, while also illuminating a path toward an alternate literary history, a counterdiscourse to the dialectical conservation of a Jewish identity anchored in the past. The chapter proposes a “Zionist” scholarly desire for self-evidence as a way of marking the pernicious historicist tendency to think about Jewishness in statist terms.
Keywords: novella, Jewish categoricalness, Abraham Cahan, The Imported Bridegroom, Jewish American literature, Jewish identity, self-evidence, Jewishness
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