Journal ArticleDOI
From Sympathy to Empathy: Anzia Yezierska and the Transformation of the American Subject
TLDR
The work of Anzia Yezierska presents a challenge to early-twentieth-century models of personhood, citizenship, and reading based on common assumptions regarding the nature of sympathy as mentioned in this paper.Abstract:
The work of Anzia Yezierska presents a challenge to early-twentieth-century models of personhood, citizenship, and reading based on common assumptions regarding the nature of sympathy. Yezierska's deployment of what Mikkelsen terms "aesthetic empathy" draws on an emergent discourse about empathy that defined this concept quite differently from current usages. Rather than designating an interpersonal dynamic, this discourse considered empathy as a relation among bodies, objects, and desire within capitalism. Yezierska's fashion-conscious characters reveal a United States constituted by economically, socially, and culturally mobile, not to mention aesthetically pleasing, bodies. Both Jewish and American, these bodies serve as touchpoints for their own desiring gazes, positing a model of assimilative empathy for "native" and immigrant alike in which "looks" refer to both an act and its object, the agent blurred with the process of her continual self-invention as a hybrid of multiple cultures.
Meditating on relations between subject and object, viewer and vision, consumer and commodity, Yezierska makes plain the role of citizen as consumer. Her work crystallizes the dominance of technologies that infused the public sphere with art and beautiful images of human forms, leading the modern spectator to see others as potential reflections of herself. Mikkelsen's examination begins with a reading of the short story "Wings"; continues with a discussion of Jewish American involvement with the garment industry and high fashion as imagined in Salome of the Tenements (1922); and concludes with early theorizations of aesthetic empathy's role in motion pictures such as Hungry Hearts (1922), the film made of Yezierska's short stories.read more
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Dissertation
Pedagogies of U.S. Imperialism: Racial Education from Reconstruction to the Progressive Era
TL;DR: In this paper, a genealogy of racial education through pedagogies developed at manual training and industrial institutes, settlement schools, and in philosophies of racial liberal education that were founded in contexts of slavery and its aftermath, settler colonialism, and imperial war is presented.
Dissertation
The Story Less Told: Representations in the Inter-War Years of the American White Working Class by Four Female Authors
TL;DR: The authors study novels written in the interwar years by four female authors: Anzia Yezierska, Fielding Burke, Grace Lumpkin, and Myra Page, studying the way in which the authors treated gender through their representation of working-class women and exploring the interaction between art and propaganda in their novels.
Book
Portrayals of Urban Jewish Communities: in U.S. American and Canadian Immigrant Fiction in Selected Texts by Anzia Yezierska and Adele Wiseman
TL;DR: In this paper, Yezierskas and Wisemans texten wird aufgezeigt wie judische Gemeinschaften in den Stadten New York and Winnipeg dargestellt werden.
Book ChapterDOI
Self-made women: novelists of the 1920s
TL;DR: In the years following the armistice, women writers were gradually but systematically eliminated from the canon of American literature as it was anthologized, studied, and taught as discussed by the authors.
Journal ArticleDOI
“A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place”: Reading Minimalism, Place, and Gender from Anzia Yezierska to Marie Kondo
TL;DR: The question of what you own is actually the question of how you want to live your life as mentioned in this paper . . . The opposite of happiness is not sadness, it's chaos, and the opposite of sadness is not happiness.