Melus: Multi-ethnic Literature of The U.s. 

About: Melus: Multi-ethnic Literature of The U.s. is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): White (horse) & Narrative. Over the lifetime, 1631 publications have been published receiving 11744 citations.

World of Our Fathers

Abstract: A new 30th Anniversary paperback edition of an award-winning classic. Winner of the National Book Award, 1976 World of Our Fathers traces the story of Eastern Europe's Jews to America over four decades. Beginning in the 1880s, it offers a rich portrayal of the East European Jewish experience in New York, and shows how the immigrant generation tried to maintain their Yiddish culture while becoming American. It is essential reading for those interested in understanding why these forebears to many of today's American Jews made the decision to leave their homelands, the challenges these new Jewish Americans faced, and how they experienced every aspect of immigrant life in the early part of the twentieth century. This invaluable contribution to Jewish literature and culture is now back in print in a new paperback edition, which includes a new foreword by noted author and literary critic Morris Dickstein.

Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature

Abstract: Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. Rosemarie Garland Thomson. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. x + 200. $45.00 cloth, $14.50 paper. Extraordinary Bodies addresses a subject of great significance and topicality with originality and sophistication; it is, or should become, a seminal work in the emerging field of disability studies, and it merits consideration by students of gender, race, and ethnicity as well. Its central claim--that "the physically extraordinary figure [seen as "monstrous," "deformed," "disabled," or "crippled"] ... is as essential to the cultural project of American self-making as the varied throng of gendered, racial, ethnic, and sexual figures of otherness that support the privileged norm"--is bold and perhaps controversial. Yet in a mere 138 pages of text, Thomson compellingly supports this thesis, deftly theorizing and deconstructing disability as a representative system akin to race and gender: "Disability ... is the attribution of corporeal deviance--not so much a property of bodies as a product of cultural rules about what bodies should be or do." Rather than ignoring or minimizing gender, race, and ethnicity as constituents of subjectivity, Thomson demonstrates that they are part of a larger cultural system which sorts bodies into hierarchies (and distributes power and privilege) according to rather arbitrary distinctions--among which "disability" is a crucial but hitherto neglected factor. The crucial move, here, then, as in poststructuralist disability studies generally, is the shift from a paradigm of disability as pathology, a defect the body, to a model of disability as a minority experience of marginalization and exclusion, or to put it differently, from an individual or medical to a social or political model. A critical feature of Thomson's analysis is its revisionist deployment of feminist theory in its major chapter, "Theorizing Disability." The starting point here is the parallel between the construction of the "female" and the "disabled" body in Western culture. But Thomson does not merely transfer feminist insights from gender to disability; she shows that feminism, which has often privileged the "normate," has much to learn about (and from) disability and that theorists of both have to be wary of the extremes of essentialism and constructionism. Thomson's considerable achievement in this chapter is to enrich and complicate our understanding of the subtle ways in which culture discriminates among various bodies; to this end, she supplements her feminist analysis with discussions of Erving Goffman's theory of stigma (in Stigma), Mary Douglas's of "dirt" (in Purity and Danger), and Michel Foucault's of "docile bodies" (in Discipline and Punish), showing how each illuminates disability from a different perspective. This section helps to elucidate the psychological sources of, and cultural ends served by, the assignment of stigma to physical difference. The rest of the book consists of nuanced and penetrating studies of disability in cultural texts from a range of media and periods: nineteenth century freak shows; sentimental fiction by Stowe, Davis, and Phelps; and twentieth century fiction by African American women writers. Rather than confining herself to documenting the prejudicial representation of deformity and disability in nineteenth and twentieth century American culture, which would be all too easy, Thomson examines the complex interplay of race, gender, and disability in different historical contexts. Thomson's discussion of freak shows demonstrates how the construction of the freak played upon related exclusive norms; freakishness was often mapped onto the characteristics of the racially or culturally Other. Building on the work of earlier scholars here, she offers an original reading of this cultural phenomenon in relation both to major historical trends of the period and to canonical literary figures, like Melville. …