Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man: Implications of Continuity in the Jewish American Short Story Collection
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Julie Dickson
Julie Dickson is a doctoral candidate in Literature at the Graduate School of North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. Her research examines the short story collection as a form within the contemporary US context. It re-theorizes how these books promote connections through repetition to afford non-linear paradigms of making narrative sense – of such social concepts as community, identity, and history – that are both historical and particularly resonant in our post-postmodern, digital age.
Abstract
The unlinked short story collection is in many ways a highly discontinuousform. With its lack of common characters or setting and the repeated closure of individual stories, the collection rejects the linear and causal continuities familiar to the conventional novel. These books instead forge other connections – namely through repetition – that offer other paradigms of continuity and knowledge for our fragmented, post-postmodern world. Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man(2020) employs just this form to take up the question of how we make narrative sense today, not only of the disjointed episodes of everyday life, but also of history – specifically as it bears on contemporary Jewish American identity and on third-generation relationships to the Shoah and Israel. Various repetitions – of theme and milieu, of writing style and repetition itself (with its resonances with trauma theory) – emerge as both the source of meaning within these stories and what creates coherence between them. Drawing on story cycle scholarship and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the Fold, this essay traces the implications of narrative continuity in To Be a Manfor third-generation representations of Jewish identity, history, Holocaust memory, and the ethical imperatives it entails.
Abstract
The unlinked short story collection is in many ways a highly discontinuousform. With its lack of common characters or setting and the repeated closure of individual stories, the collection rejects the linear and causal continuities familiar to the conventional novel. These books instead forge other connections – namely through repetition – that offer other paradigms of continuity and knowledge for our fragmented, post-postmodern world. Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man(2020) employs just this form to take up the question of how we make narrative sense today, not only of the disjointed episodes of everyday life, but also of history – specifically as it bears on contemporary Jewish American identity and on third-generation relationships to the Shoah and Israel. Various repetitions – of theme and milieu, of writing style and repetition itself (with its resonances with trauma theory) – emerge as both the source of meaning within these stories and what creates coherence between them. Drawing on story cycle scholarship and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the Fold, this essay traces the implications of narrative continuity in To Be a Manfor third-generation representations of Jewish identity, history, Holocaust memory, and the ethical imperatives it entails.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Contents VII
- Introduction: Forms of Narrative Continuation 1
- Continuation and the Novel: Open Context and the Problem of Closure 15
- Clotels: Bad Beginnings, Instructive Continuations 31
- “He Keeps Happening”: Character and Situation in W. D. Howells’s A Modern Instance 61
- Serial Singularity: Reading for the Project Form in the Business Romance 83
- Genre-Bending Literary Fiction and the Pleasure of Immersion in Fictional Worlds 113
- The Eternal Draft: Authorial Revision and Philip Roth’s Construction of the Oeuvre 141
- Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man: Implications of Continuity in the Jewish American Short Story Collection 165
- Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: Novels, Middles, and Serialization in an Electronic Age 197
- Of Masks and Men: Percival Everett’s James 221
- Eclogue: The End of History in Verse (Continued) 247
- Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Staged Future of Robots 267
- The Remake as Fetish Art: On Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Other Psychos 293
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Contents VII
- Introduction: Forms of Narrative Continuation 1
- Continuation and the Novel: Open Context and the Problem of Closure 15
- Clotels: Bad Beginnings, Instructive Continuations 31
- “He Keeps Happening”: Character and Situation in W. D. Howells’s A Modern Instance 61
- Serial Singularity: Reading for the Project Form in the Business Romance 83
- Genre-Bending Literary Fiction and the Pleasure of Immersion in Fictional Worlds 113
- The Eternal Draft: Authorial Revision and Philip Roth’s Construction of the Oeuvre 141
- Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man: Implications of Continuity in the Jewish American Short Story Collection 165
- Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: Novels, Middles, and Serialization in an Electronic Age 197
- Of Masks and Men: Percival Everett’s James 221
- Eclogue: The End of History in Verse (Continued) 247
- Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Staged Future of Robots 267
- The Remake as Fetish Art: On Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Other Psychos 293
