Jewish-American gothic

This dissertation considers the literary gothicism of several representative Jewish-American works of fiction. I use a wide range of classic works of gothic fiction, as well as a cross section of critical readings of the gothic, to determine how and why Jewish-American fiction reimagines one ethnic American Dream as a horrific gothic nightmare. The study concludes that Jewish-American gothic fiction, a sub-genre that has not received the critical attention of other regional and ethnic expressions of the gothic, mirrors the wider genre's interest in the frightening and vertiginous transgression of constructions of reality and the self. Jewish-American gothic fiction exposes the dark side of transformation as the fragmentation underlying the romantic quest for self-reinvention imagined in the process of immigration/assimilation, a journey in search of and in flight from the self.;The Introduction establishes the contextual basis for a discussion of the gothic nature of Jewish-American fiction. Referring to Freud's reading of the uncanny and Kristevala work on abjection, this dissertation places Jewish-American fiction within a literary tradition concerned with the return of a repressed past, figured as supernatural, that threatens the present. A central feature of the gothic idiom in Jewish-American fiction is the liminal exile of both immigrant and assimilated Jew, interstitial creatures caught in the horrors of transformation who struggle with frightening doubles in uncertain, marginal settings.;Chapter One, Transformations, focuses on three stories by Cynthia Ozick which employ Jewish folklore and mystical tradition to establish their relation to a gothic literary tradition. Chapter Two, Settings, considers Henry Roth's Call It Sleep as an example of Jewish-American urban gothic fiction in which New York City is an irrational monster, a labyrinthine nightmare that functions as a screen for the projection of David Schearl's unconscious fears and desires, as well as their cause. Chapter Three, Doubles, discusses character and textual doubling in Saul Bellow's The Victim and Bernard Malamud's The Tenants in which an American Jew defines and redefines his Jewish self in relation to a threatening alter ego and sees his assumptions regarding self and world collapse.