Walking in Deserts, Writing out of Wounds
Jewishness and Deconstruction in Paul Auster's Literary Work
by Kathrin Kramer
Hardback (Published)
(January 2008)
ISBN: 9783825353667
5.28 x 8.27 inches
Price: $47.00
On back order
This analysis of selected texts by the Jewish-American author Paul Auster demonstrates the importance of Jewish teaching and history in his work for the development of a deconstructive style of writing. Marina Tsvetaeva’s and Edmond Jabes’ dictum, “all poets are Jews”, serves as the focus on the aesthetic experience of alienation from language, which corresponds to the alienation from Jewish tradition in Auster’s poetry and prose. In Auster’s critical reception of Jacques Derrida, this alienation appears as a wound initiating the writing process. Since language is characterized by inconsistency and changeability, the lyrical persona keeps walking on stony paths through desert-like areas, while its destination to render some sort of “truth” remains out of sight. Focusing on Auster’s poetry and his novels ‘The Invention of Solitude’, ‘City of Glass’, ‘In the Country of Last Things’, and ‘The Book of Illusions’, this investigation attempts to explain why the connection of Auster’s aesthetic intentions with Jewish thought led him to abandon poetry altogether for the medium of prose. The interpretation of the religious dimension of these novels offers new readings which move away from the fixation on postmodern playfulness and arbitrariness.
- By (author) Kathrin Kramer
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William Apess's Reflections of Ethnic Consciousness
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The Culture of Corporeality
Aesthetic Experience and the Embodiment of America, 1945-1960
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Walking in the Wilderness
The Peripatetic Tradition in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Painting
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American Studies/Shifting Gears
A Publication of the DFG Research Network 'The Futures of (European) American Studies'
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Temporality in American Filmic Autobiography
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Volume 187
The Americanization of Human Rights
Iranian, African, and Chinese Lives in American Autobiography
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Crossroads in American Studies
Transnational and Biocultural Encounters. Essays in Honor of Rudiger Kunow
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Faith Matters
Religion, Ethnicity, and Survival in Louise Erdrich's and Toni Morrison's Fiction
Volume 149
Narrative Instability
Destabilizing Identities, Realities, and Textualities in Contemporary American Popular Culture
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