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- Title
The Media Myth of America.
- Authors
Gellen, Kata
- Abstract
Joseph Roth never set foot in America, yet it has a prominent place in his literary world. The scholarly consensus has been that America is viewed largely, if not entirely, in a negative light-a technological hell where family life and Jewish tradition rapidly deteriorate. This essay revises this view through careful readings of aesthetic and religious experience in the novels Hiob (1930) and Tarabas (1934). Far from rejecting American modernity as false, Roth's novels present America as a possible location- indeed, a necessary stepping stone-for Jewish renewal in modernity. Moreover, America is a transitional and experimental site as well for Roth, who must look beyond the literary registers typically associated with him-journalistic reportage, Habsburg myth, and biblical allegory-in order to represent the Jewish geographical trajectory of his time. In so doing, he generates a new literary register-that of the "media myth of America." The essay shifts the terms of the debate away from Roth's verdict on America to an analysis of America as an imaginative product of certain literary, historical, and biographical constraints.
- Subjects
ROTH, Joseph, 1894-1939; AMERICAN literature; JEWISH renewal; MODERNITY in literature; BIBLE. Job
- Publication
Journal of Austrian Studies, 2012, Vol 45, Issue 3/4, p1
- ISSN
2165-669X
- Publication type
Essay
- DOI
10.1353/oas.2012.0013