David Brauner - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Edited Books by David Brauner

Papers by David Brauner

European Judaism

This is a detailed, wide-ranging interview with the Booker-Prize-winning novelist, broadcaster an... more This is a detailed, wide-ranging interview with the Booker-Prize-winning novelist, broadcaster and public intellectual Howard Jacobson, conducted by the author of the only monograph on his work. On the eve of the publication of his memoir, Mother’s Boy, Jacobson discusses that work, his relationship with his parents, his attitude towards other novelists, and his views on, among other things, Jewishness, antisemitism, poetry, art, television and Trump.

The Yearbook of English Studies, 2002

Shakespearean Illuminations: Essays in Honor of Marvin Rosenberg. Ed. By Jay L. Halio and Hugh Ri... more Shakespearean Illuminations: Essays in Honor of Marvin Rosenberg. Ed. By Jay L. Halio and Hugh Richmond. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 1998. 371 pp. 45 [pounds sterling]. The Festschrift is a curious beast: unlike most collections of academic essays, what unites its contributors is not necessarily the subject of those essays, but their admiration for a colleague, to whom the volume is offered as a tribute. Like its sporting equivalent, the football testimonial, you can usually judge the importance of its recipient by the eminence of those who turn out to do their stuff for her/him, so a glance at the list of the contributors to this book (which is edited by Jay L. Halio and Hugh Richmond and includes pieces by John F. Andrews, Maurice Charney, Stephen Booth, and John Russell Brown) should tell us that Rosenberg is an important and influential Shakespearean critic. Best known for his work on the four great tragedies, he was one of the pioneers in a field that has now become very crowded: the analysis of Shakespeare in performance. When he made his name with The Masks of Othello in 1961, the tendency in Shakespeare criticism, still dominated by the legacy of A. C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), was to read Shakespeare as a novelist. Even a critic such as Harley Granville-Barker, who was very much concerned with how to perform the plays, generally had little recourse either to their stage history, or to contemporary productions. Rosenberg, on the other hand, saw the limitations of such abstract discussions and grounded his analyses in detailed consideration of actual performances, past and present, while at the same time sensitively paying attention to the plays' formal qualities. More recently, his work on the construction of personality in Shakespeare, and in particular his development of the concept of polyphony, has been taken up by a younger generation of scholars. As one might expect, then, many of the essays here pay tribute to Rosenberg implicitly, not merely by the fact of their inclusion, but by virtue of the Rosenbergian approach they take to their material (the three sections of the book, `The Major Tragedies', `Language, Politics and History', and `Actors and Acting, Directing and Staging', each reflect one of Rosenberg's main areas of interest). Indeed, many of them explicitly invoke his name, and respectfully, but not over-reverentially, discuss his work. Yet, if this collection accurately reflects Rosenberg's legacy as a critic, then that legacy seems to me to be a mixed one. Certainly, there are some fine pieces here (I particularly enjoyed Stephen Booth's witty, acute reflections `On the Aesthetics of Acting' and Philip C. McGuire's essay on the staging of the final scene of Othello), but there are also one or two rather turgid investigations of textual variants (an area into which Rosenberg ventures more pragmatically), as well as several pieces that, while ostensibly pursuing Rosenberg's interest in the particulars of Shakespeare's dramaturgy, are little more than anecdotal accounts, or glorified reviews, of specific theatrical productions. …

Philip Roth Studies, 2005

The backbone of twentieth-century American literature has been provided by two novelists-William ... more The backbone of twentieth-century American literature has been provided by two novelists-William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the twentieth century. For me as a writer The Adventures of Augie March remains the most inspiring American novel I've ever read. Nobody has topped Bellow at writing a novel about a city-bred American and probably nobody will.-Philip Roth, 5 April 2005, on the death of Saul BellowUnlike those of us who came howling into the world, blind and bare, Mr. Roth appears with nails, hair and teeth, speaking coherently. At twenty-six he is skillful, witty, and energetic and performs like a virtuoso. [. . .] My advice to Mr. Roth is to ignore all objections and to continue on his present course.-Saul Bellow, July 1959, review of Goodbye, ColumbusEditor's Note: On the evening of 5 April 2005, I was putting the final touches on a paper that I was to deliver at the 19th annual MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.) Conference in Chicago. It was then, checking an online news source to discover the weather in the Windy City, that I learned of the passing of Saul Bellow. He had died earlier that day, and it struck me as a somber coincidence that in less than forty-eight hours, I would be in the city of Augie March. Bellow had not lived in Chicago for many years, but I was hoping to find a bit of him present at the conference. I did not. There were no papers on Bellow-he has never been the most popular figure among MELUS members, and besides, he had said many times that he disliked being called a Jewish, or "ethnic," writer-but nonetheless, many there privately expressed their grief over the death of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist. Among friends, we talked between panels and over meals, sharing our various histories and experiences reading his works. It was not a scholarly eulogy, surely no organized retrospective, but it helped us to place the significance of Bellow in our reading lives.For this issue of Philip Roth Studies, I have asked a number of friends and colleagues to do just this: share their thoughts on Bellow, what he meant to us personally and what he meant to the literary world, including his influence on Philip Roth. As for me, it was through the novels and stories of Bellow that I first came to know Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoys Complaint. He was my "gateway" to Roth. His name always seemed to be linked to Roth's (and to Bernard Malamud's-Bellow served as a gateway there as well), so perhaps my work with this journal is a logical outgrowth of my fascination with The Adventures of Augie March, Seize the Day, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler's Planet. His fingerprints are here and all over the literary world, in places we cannot even detect. Roth apparently sensed them throughout his writing career, for he felt the need to issue an official statement, through his agent, the day after Bellow's death. Those of us associated with Philip Roth Studies feel the same. Consider the paragraphs that follow a testimony to Saul Bellow's legacy.-Derek Parker RoyalI was in graduate school when The Adventures of Augie March appeared. I remember my pleased astonishment when this "Jewish novel" received a rave front-page review in the New York Times Book Review and glowing acknowledgments in all the other literary publications. In those years following World War II, the New Criticism reigned supreme, and "serious students" of literature were expected to concentrate on English, not American, literature and certainly not on any contemporary work. Time was needed, our professors assured us, for a poem, play, or novel to gain major literary status. Indeed, my professors at both UCLA and USC (Ivy League and Johns Hopkins PhDs, for the most part) were then only grudgingly adding post-Victorian or "Edwardian" works to their reading lists. American literature itself was viewed as an area of study suitable only for the weaker or more frivolous students-or, as one of my undergraduate professors warned me-for "lazy" ones. …

The Modern Language Review, 2003

The Modern Language Review, 2012

Journal of American Studies, 2013

The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction, 2015

Comparative American Studies An International Journal, 2021

ABSTRACT In the Author’s Note to Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel writes: ‘As far as I am concern... more ABSTRACT In the Author’s Note to Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel writes: ‘As far as I am concerned, every word of this book is the complete and total truth. But of course, it’s my truth’. The tension between this absolute claim to ‘truth’ and the acknowledgement that this truth is personal and subjective is one that resonates throughout the memoir. On the one hand, Wurtzel takes great pains to establish the authenticity of her narrative; on the other hand, she is acutely aware of the ways in which it – and the life it describes – is performative, shaped by a confessional impulse that she situates in the tradition of confessional writing. In this article, I explore how Prozac Nation stages and interrogates confessional acts, simultaneously constructing and deconstructing notions of authenticity. I focus on the ways in which Wurtzel deploys cultural references to represent herself as both exceptional and representative, her narrative exemplifying what it is like to be, as the book’s subtitle puts it, ‘Young and Depressed in America’, while at the same time insisting on the singularity of its author’s experience. I conclude by arguing that Prozac Nation rejects the authentic/inauthentic binary, presenting a mediated series of selves that are always in flux.

Philip Roth, 2013

This innovative series reflects the breadth and diversity of writing over the last thirty years, ... more This innovative series reflects the breadth and diversity of writing over the last thirty years, and provides critical evaluations of established, emerging and critically neglected writers-mixing the canonical with the unexpected. It explores notions of the contemporary and analyses current and developing modes of representation with a focus on individual writers and their work. The series seeks to reflect both the growing body of academic research in the field, and the increasing prevalence of contemporary American and Canadian fiction on programmes of study in institutions of higher education around the world. Central to the series is a concern that each book should argue a stimulating thesis, rather than provide an introductory survey, and that each contemporary writer will be examined across the trajectory of their literary production. A variety of critical tools and literary and interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged to illuminate the ways in which a particular writer contributes to, and helps readers rethink, the North American literary and cultural landscape in a global context. Central to debates about the field of contemporary fiction is its role in interrogating ideas of national exceptionalism and transnationalism. This series matches the multivocality of contemporary writing with wide-ranging and detailed analysis. Contributors examine the drama of the nation from the perspectives of writers who are members of established and new immigrant groups, writers who consider themselves on the nation's margins as well as those who chronicle middle America. National labels are the subject of vociferous debate and including American and Canadian writers in the same series is not to flatten the differences between them but to acknowledge that literary traditions and tensions are cross-cultural and that North American writers often explore and expose precisely these tensions. The series recognises that situating a writer in a cultural context involves a multiplicity of influences, social and geo-political, artistic and theoretical, and that contemporary fiction defies easy categorisation. For example, it examines writers who invigorate the genres in which they have made their mark alongside writers whose aesthetic

The New Jewish American Literary Studies, 2019

Philip Roth, Jul 19, 2013

Philip Roth Studies, 2019

Philip Roth Studies, 2017