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

(LeRoi Jones, Black Magic: Collected Poetry, 1961-1967 (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), pp. 205-206.)

(20.) See chapter 1 of W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk.

(21.) Walter Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by John Osborne (London: Verso, 1985), Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 255-266.

(22.) Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952); Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (New York: Robert O. Ballou, 1934), Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Doran, 1945), Saul Bellow, The Victim (New York: Vanguard Press, 1947); Philip Roth, Operation Shylock: A Confession (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993); David Bradley, The Chaneysville Incident (New York: Harper & Row, 1981); Wideman, "Fever," in Fever, pp. 1-17, Wideman, "Hostages," in Fever, pp. 41-57; Wideman, "Valaida"; Malamud, "The Jewbird," in The Stories of Bernard Malamud, pp. 144-154; Malamud, "The Angel Levine"; Malamud, "Black Is My Favorite Color"; and David Mamet's screenplay of his interesting failure, Homicide (Burbank, CA: An Edward R. Pressman and Cinehaus Inc. Film Production, 1992).

(23.) "Literaturized Blacks and Jews; or, Golems and Tar Babies: Reality and its Shadows in John Edgar Wideman and Bernard Malamud," Newton, Facing Black and Jew.

(24.) Malamud's "The Jewbird," "The Angel Levine," and "Black Is My Favorite Color."

(25.) Wideman, "Valaida," "Fever," and "Hostages."

(26.) In "Hostages" he misreads a crucial detail, mistakenly identifying the first husband of the woman narrator as an Egyptian Jew. (He's actually an Israeli Arab.) It's a small point, but since Newton consistently assumes that his readers understand the texts as well as he does, never stooping to mere literary criticism, I have to wonder where else he may have gotten the mundane details wrong. (My unfortunate training in New Criticism, with its insistence on "close reading," reveals itself.) Brush off these flyspeck cavils! Newton nails it when he writes, "Wideman succeeds in insulating his black and Jewish narrators from facile literaturization" (139).

(27.) Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981).

(28.) Abdul Jan Mohamed, Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983).

ROBERT PHILIPSON is an independent scholar living in Oakland, California. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin. His review of Struggles in the Promised Land, by Jack Salzman and Cornel West, appeared in the Fall 1998 issue.