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UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations UC San Diego UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Cultural Scars: The Poetics of Trauma and Disability in 20th Century Jewish Literature Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3h20h0xw Author Talve-Goodman, Sarika Publication Date 2016 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Cultural Scars: The Poetics of Trauma and Disability in 20th Century Jewish Literature A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Literature by Sarika Talve-Goodman Committee in charge: Professor Michael Davidson, Co-Chair Professor Amelia Glaser, Co-Chair Professor Page Dubois Professor Brian Goldfarb Professor Lisa Lampert-Weissig Professor Hana Wirth-Nesher 2016 Copyright Sarika Talve-Goodman, 2016 All rights reserved. The Dissertation of Sarika Talve-Goodman is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Co-Chair ________________________________________________________________________ Co-Chair University of California, San Diego 2016 iii DEDICATION For my family—my home wherever I am, whose love and support sustains me iv EPIGRAPH Words work as release—well-oiled doors opening and closing between intention, gesture. A pulse in the neck, the shiftiness of the hands, an unconscious blink, the conversations you have with your eyes translate everything and nothing. What will be needed, what goes unfelt, unsaid—what has been duplicated, redacted here, redacted there. Altered to hide or disguise—words encoding the bodies they cover. And despite everything the body remains. Occasionally it is interesting to think about the outburst if you would just cry out— To know what you’ll sound like is worth noting— Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (p. 69) v TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature page .................................................................................................................... iii Dedication .......................................................................................................................... iv Epigraph ...............................................................................................................................v Table of Contents ............................................................................................................... vi Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................. vii Vita ................................................................................................................................... viii Abstract of the Dissertation ............................................................................................... ix Introduction The Cultural Scar: Trauma, Disability, and Jewishness in the 20th Century .......................1 Chapter One The Mentshele and the Poetics of Mourning in Transnational Jewish Modernism ...........29 Chapter Two Monsters with Scars: Lamed Shapiro’s “The Cross” and Other Avant-Garde Jewish Horror Stories .....................................................................................................................74 Chapter Three The Poetics of Postwar Survivor Guilt ............................................................................111 Chapter Four “Beyond the Intrusive Glare”: Hysteria as Contemporary Jewish Cultural Narrative ....150 Epilogue “You are Not Sick, You are Injured”: Further Directions in a Theory of the Cultural Scar .......................................................187 Works Cited .....................................................................................................................196 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I extend my deepest gratitude to my advisors, Amelia Glaser and Michael Davidson, for their guidance and support; to Amelia for so many careful reads; to my whole delightful committee; to Page Dubois, Lisa Lampert-Weissig, Hana Wirth-Nesher, and Brian Goldfarb for invaluable advice and conversation along the way; to Rita Charon and the program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University for giving me ongoing guidance and an intellectual home; and to Anne Eakin Moss and Ken Moss for long time mentorship and friendship. Thank you, all of you, for support of many kinds. Thank you to all of my colleagues and dear friends from the Literature department and from 4627 Campus Avenue, who teach me so much. I would also like to especially thank my sister and my heart, Adina, for her patient and thoughtful editing of so much of my writing. Chapter two, in an early version, was submitted to Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, and received generous feedback for revision and a request to resubmit. Talve-Goodman, Sarika. “Into the Apocalypse: ‘The Cross’ and Other Avant- Garde Jewish Horror Stories,” 2015. The dissertation author was the primary author of this paper. vii VITA 2007 Bachelor of Arts, The Johns Hopkins University 2010 Master of Science in Narrative Medicine, Columbia University 2010-2013 Teaching Assistant, Muir College Writing Program University of California, San Diego 2013-2014 Fulbright Student Award, United States-Israel Educational Foundation 2010-2016 Doctor of Philosophy in Literature, University of California, San Diego PUBLICATIONS 2013 “Book Review: Cheryl Mattingly’s The Paradox of Hope: Journeys Through a Clinical Borderland.” Literature and Medicine, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Issue 30, no.2. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Literature Jewish Studies and Jewish Literatures Professors Amelia Glaser, Hana Wirth-Nesher, and Lisa Lampert-Weissig Modernism Studies Professors Michael Davidson and Amelia Glaser Disability Studies Professors Michael Davidson and Brian Goldfarb Trauma Studies Professors Page Dubois and Michael Davidson viii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Cultural Scars: The Poetics of Trauma and Disability in 20th Century Jewish Literature by Sarika Talve-Goodman Doctor of Philosophy in Literature Professor Michael Davidson, Co-Chair Professor Amelia Glaser, Co-Chair Amidst the emergence of modern European nation states and the racialized logic of global modernity, Jewish people began to be considered “sick,” first by official discourses of knowledge—such as government, medicine, and psychoanalysis—then by themselves. In turn-of-the-century psychoanalysis and racial science, hallmarks of global modernity, for example, hysteria was a disease associated with the immutable and inferior natures of women and Jewish men. Approaching Jewish literatures comparatively and transnationally, spanning medical and cultural archives from the modernist period to ix today, my project examines a cultural genealogy that tropes the modern Jew’s body as “sick”—a locus of sexual and racial difference. I bring scholarship on the modern Jewish body—by Sander Gilman, Todd Presner, Daniel Boyarin, and others—together with critical theories of modernity and their postcolonial revisions. By tracing trauma and disability as expressions of how racially gendered capitalism is embodied and survived, my project contributes to recent efforts to bridge trauma with disability studies, as well as bring both fields into conversation with categories of race, gender, and sexuality. The archive of Jewish hysteria offers an example of a literary mode that I am calling the “cultural scar.” This is a mode in which overlapping metaphors of illness, disability, and trauma express a multiplicity of global modernity’s violence, implicitly articulating relatedness between different and uneven histories of loss. Imbricated in turn- of-the-century ideologies like nationalism, race, heterosexuality, and eugenics, inventions of modern Jewish culture and politics often rejected the effeminate, “queer”, racialized, diasporic, and sickly Jewish body. This body—the Jewish hysteric—haunts and unsettles canonical works of Jewish literature from the modernist period to today. Through close readings—from the grotesque figure of the mentshele (or little person) in transnational Jewish modernism, to guilt in post-Holocaust poetry, to contemporary “hysterical” women in American Jewish and Israeli literature—I show that hysteria is a mode of Jewish cultural production and critical memory that offers unsettled forms of identity and politics through a poetics of mourning. Embodying the mode of the cultural scar, these figures express transnational histories of violence and loss that work against celebratory national and diasporic forms. x Introduction The Cultural Scar: Trauma, Disability, and Jewishness in the 20th Century It is time that the stone grew accustomed to blooming, that unrest formed a heart. Es is Zeit, dass der Stein sich zu blühen bequemt, dass der Unrast ein Herz schlägt. (44) (Paul Celan, “Corona”, translated by Jerome Rothenberg)1 Cultural Scars and Global Modernity The central concern of this study is how histories, experiences, and affects explored here under the rubric of trauma can form the basis of culture. The epigraph from Paul Celan—the Jewish German-language poet who survived the
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