| Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991), Nobel Prize winner in Literature in1978, is a JewishAmerican writer. There have been abundant research achievements of I. B. Singer and hisworks. And the opinions diverge due to different material each researcher possesses anddifferent academic school he (she) belongs to. In China, scholars usually carry out theirstudies in different literary theories, particularly in archetypal criticism and biographical study.Singer’s literary achievement is generally credited to his short stories, of which Jimpel theFool is the mostly recognized. Singer is also well known for his memoirs, children’s booksand novels. Singer’s novels are generally categorized as the realistic family sagas and thefantastic fictions. The Family Moskat, The Manor and The Estate belong to the family novelgroup that makes him evocative of the19thcentury Russian realists. To approach Singer’sfamily novels, we can not discard the use of biographical material. However, biographicalmaterial should not become confinements in understanding Singer’s novels. The thesis plansto adopt New Historicism theory in interpreting Singer’s three family novels. New Historicistsare a group of practitioners in Renaissance studies who carry out their research by exploringthe meaning and hidden politics in anecdotes that have long been neglected. New Historicismtheory regards all texts as being related with one another; thus, texts are in energy exchangewith other social forces. The words “negotiation”,“subversion”,“containment”“fashioning”have almost become the hallmarks of New Historicism. The thesis aims at a properapplication of New Historicism theory in the study of Singer’s family novels. The overview ofthe thesis is as the following:The first chapter is an introduction to Singer’s life and works, in particular, to his threefamily novels. A general idea about New Historicism is also stated in this part, and wherebyan argumentation for the plausibility of the research is demonstrated.In the second chapter, the discussion will be limited to the world described in the texts.Different, even conflicting kinds of women characters will be demonstrated as participating inthe process of “negotiation”—both literally and metaphorically. Calman and Ezriel’s personalgrowth processes will be deliberated as examples of the notions of “subverion” and“containment” within the characters’ inner-selves. The anti-Semitism atmosphere in society at large and the prevailing corrupted business ethics will be used to reveal the subversion andcontainment struggle among the characters.The third chapter of the thesis goes beyond the world of the texts of Singer’s three familynovels. In the first section of the chapter, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s apprenticeship with hisbrother Israel Joshua Singer and his indebtedness to Russian writers Ivan Turgenev, FyodorDostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy serve to illustrate the relation of “intertextuality” between I. B.Singer’s three family novels and some other literary texts. In the second section, the incidentsinvolving the publication, translation and expansion of the novels are meant to show thatliterary texts do not come out of nothing, rather, their coming-into-being results fromnegotiation of various kinds of material forces in the society.The fourth chapter of the thesis is a concluding part, which ends with a tentativeassertion that Singer is “fashioning”—a verb borrowed from New Historicist StephanGreenblatt—a narrative history of Polish Jewry, which is his own making, loaded with hisown emotions, beliefs and even biases. In writing the family novels, Singer doesn’t solelymean to entertain; rather, he is fashioning history. |
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