Literary Criticism as Anything But Literary Criticism - Imagining Each Other: Blacks and Jews in Contemporary American Literature - Facing Black and Jew: Literature as Public Space in Twentieth-Century America - Book Review

Judaism, Fall, 2002 by Robert Philipson

Does the emperor have any clothes? A few. Newton is a smart man; interesting comments and insights into the texts themselves sprinkle the book like tantalizing fragments of something that might have been actually both pleasurable and instructive. In the end, however, whatever insights the book might provide are sabotaged by a truly alienating discourse: bad philosophizing, a scholarly apparatus gone wrong (45 pages of notes to 168 pages of text), and an impenetrable thicket of jargon. Was there any editorial judgment exercised at all? Who's going to read this stuff?

As different, and varyingly successful, as these two books are, they're both premised on the assumption that literary texts can be used to make sociopolitical observations. Both rely on theory to provide the perspective that allows for such a procedure. Goffman underutilizes his theory while Newton errs in the opposite direction. Beyond these failings, how legitimate is the project itself? When one constructs a corpus around a sociopolitical "problem," such as Black-Jewish relations, won't literature always be subordinate to politics and sociology? Not necessarily. Creations such as "French literature," "African-American literature," and "Israeli literature" are just as much sociopolitical constructions as the body of work identified in these two books. However, for both Goffman and Newton, the sociopolitical dimension is the more "important" one, the one that structures textual interpretation. Oddly enough, the literary theory that has the longest history and most success with political readings of literature is one that barely registers on either professor's radar-Marxism. One need only look at the writings of Frederic Jameson (27) and Abdul JanMohamed (28) to see examples of political readings which are not only theoretically sophisticated but which open even the best literature up to greater appreciation.

Still, as a first round and introduction, Imagining Each Other is now an indispensable primer on the literature of Black-Jewish relations. There is more of this work coming. And as for Facing Black and Jew ... it is either the poster child of literary criticism gone disastrously wrong or a pearl thrown before this particular swine. In either case, its eventual vindication or quick disappearance is an issue of the future. For the moment we are left with beginnings.

NOTES

(1.) Nat Hentoff, ed., Black Anti-Semitism and Jewish Racism (New York: Richard W. Baron, 1969).

(2.) Cynthia Ozick, "Literary Blacks and Jews," in Art & Ardor (New York: Knopf, 1983).

(3.) Ethan Goffman, Imagining Each Other (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000); Adam Zachary Newton, Facing Black and Jew (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

(4.) Michael Walzer, "Blacks and Jews: A Personal Reflection," in Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States, edited by Jack Salzman and Cornel West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 401.

(5.) Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Harper, 1940).