Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Farooq, Nihad M.

Titel

Of Science and Excess: Jacob Riis, Anzia Yezierska, and the Modernist Turn in Immigrant Fiction

Ist Teil von

• American studies (Lawrence), 2014-01, Vol.53 (4), p.73-94

Ort / Verlag

Lawrence: Mid-America American Studies Association

Erscheinungsjahr

2014

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• "65 As Yezierska's writing reveals, such masculinist strategies of assimilation, like those advocated by Riis and Dewey, only intensified the desire of immigrants to look back at their European roots with a competing nostalgia for the way things were that conflicted with the parallel desire of those who wished to "steamroll" them into an amnesiac American citizenship.66 While Yezierska's language employs the already feminized melodramatic strategy of excess to authenticate immigrant spaces as enclaves of a new and growing American diversity, Riis's language works to steer and contain this excess, perpetuating an image of the Lower East Side as a foreign territory that must be recolonized and made American by an older, more established stock. [...]the study of the literary and ethnographic projects of Americanization in the realist and modernist periods of Riis and Yezierska must necessarily be considered transnational projects, for to examine the inauguration of American modernity through discourses of race and ethnicity that remapped the American landscape and to examine immigrant literature beyond just "a ritual enacting Americanization," one must look to other narratives of imperialism, evolution, and, of course, kinship stories that move within and beyond "national archetypes" and the stories of "Anglo-Protestant" forefathers.67 Although the strategic use of affective language might ultimately fail in fully achieving social reform and recognition as both Riis and Yezierska imagined and hoped it could, this kind of expression does take the first step in offering what Homi Bhabha calls "an act of cultural translation," revealing "the heterogeneity of a population," that driving threat of an inherent and essential foreignness which is the foundation of all ideologies of nation formation.68