Can I read Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque (Michigan Studies In Comparative Jewish Cultures) on EtoBox?

Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque (Michigan Studies In Comparative Jewish Cultures) by Miriam Udel; American Council of Learned Societies is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque (Michigan Studies In Comparative Jewish Cultures) about?

It was only when Jewish writers gave up on the lofty Enlightenment ideals of progress and improvement that the Yiddish novel could decisively enter modernity. Animating their fictions were a set of unheroic heroes who struck a precarious balance between sanguinity and irony that author Miriam Udel captures through the phrase “never better.” With this rhetorical homage toward the double-voiced utterances of Sholem Aleichem, Udel gestures at these characters’ insouciant proclamation that things had never been better, and their rueful, even despairing admission that things would probably never get better. The characters defined by this dual consciousness constitute a new kind of protagonist: a distinctively Jewish scapegrace whom Udel denominates the polit or refugee. Cousin to the Golden Age Spanish pícaro , the polit is a socially marginal figure who narrates his own story in discrete episodes, as if stringing beads on a narrative necklace. A deeply unsettled figure, the polit is allergic to sentimentality and even routine domesticity. His sequential misadventures point the way toward the heart of the picaresque, which Jewish authors refashion as a vehicle for mod

Who reads Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque (Michigan Studies In Comparative Jewish Cultures)?

Author

Miriam Udel; American Council of Learned Societies

Publisher

University of Michigan Press

Published

2016

Language

EN

ISBN

9780472073054

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

Literary Fiction, History, Literary Criticism