Long internal to Europe, Jews are nevertheless for centuries either relegated to the past or seen as a marginal group, as outsiders, as alien invaders of Christian Europe. This begins to change in the Enlightenment. But only in the modernist period, and then only in prose fiction, do Jews and Jewishness come to occupy a central position—a position difficult to perceive in retrospect owing to the tendency to view the early twentieth century through the retrospective lens of the Nazi years and to the practice of defining Jewishness in unduly restrictive terms. Modernist fiction responds to the collapse of shared values with an attenuation of plot yoked to a structurally autobiographical recreation of ordinary social life, including the lives of people very different from the author (Proust, Kafka, Joyce). This moment proves congenial to the Jewish writer, less exclusively attached to the nation than are many contemporary authors. Jewish modernist fiction thus marks the transition from the literature of Europe and the West to the category of world literature.

Pre-Circulated Paper Link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4fddpx2esrvg4u4/Chapter

Walter Cohen is professor of English at the University of Michigan. From 1980 to 2014, he was professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University, where he received a distinguished teaching award and held various college and university administrative posts for two decades. He is the author of Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain, and of numerous articles on Renaissance literature, literary criticism, the history of the novel, and world literature. He is also one of the co-editors of The Norton Shakespeare. His talk is drawn from his new book, A History of European Literature: The West and the World from Antiquity to the Present, which has just been published by Oxford University Press.

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