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WORKSHOP:
Comparative Cultural Studies 4
Aspects of Literature and Perspectives of CultureChair: Peter Petro (The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada)
Franz Kafka, Philip Roth, and the "Jewish Demons"
Medin, Daniel L. (Washington University, St. Louis, USA)
In his paper, "Franz Kafka, Philip Roth, and the 'Jewish Demons'," Daniel L. Medin discusses Jewish literature and its place in Western literature. In a 1921 letter to Max Brod, Franz Kafka suggests that the inspiration of contemporary Jewish writers (in German) like himself is rooted in their inability to escape the Judaism of their fathers. Some sixty years later, Philip Roth's Zuckerman Bound depicts the conflict of a "first generation American father possessed by the Jewish demons" and his "second generation American son possessed by their exorcism." Medin argues that this shared wrestling with Jewish identity and discusses the effect of "paradoxes of freedom" on the work of both authors. He also shows how the restraining limitations of Jewish self-awareness imposed upon each writer by his family -- and by his surrounding society -- inspire the need to exorcise such "Jewish demons" (this exercise, though doomed to failure, is eventually understood by both authors as essential to their fiction).
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