Michael Chabon

This chapter offers an overview and theorization of the strand in contemporary American fiction I have dubbed the New Sincerity. Writers whose work is discussed in the chapter include Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, George Saunders, Dana Spiotta, Colson Whitehead and David Foster Wallace.

Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning historical novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) focuses on two Jewish cousins who first meet in their late teens: Samuel Clay, who had been brought up by his mother in Brooklyn, and Josef (Joe) Kavalier, the only member of his Prague-based family that escapes to America before WWII. While the cousins succeed in the developing comic book industry to which many Jewish Americans have contributed, their personal identities are complicated by other features of American life during WWII. Whereas Sammy suffers from the absence of his father and struggles with the realization of his homosexuality which is not easily accepted by contemporary society, Joe finds it too hard to function as his American girlfriend’s partner while dealing with the successive announcements of his family members’ deaths in Europe. Thus, this paper examines how the historical circumstances and familial backgrounds of the two protagonists influence their identity formation.

Michael Chabon's second novel Wonder Boys (1995) focuses on Grady Tripp, a professor of creative writing whose personal and professional problems culminate during a writers' festival on campus. A first person account of a series of unexpected events that Grady and his student James Leer experience in and outside of Pittsburgh during one weekend, the novel received mixed reviews. Whereas Robert Ward praised the text for being " the ultimate writing-program novel, " Michael Gorra denounced it, in a rather simplified way, as " another novel about a writer messing up his life. " Most famously, Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post review appreciated the novel's style and effective use of comic elements, but concluded that the text portrays a limited experience similar to the author's own, thus urging Chabon " to move on, to break away from the first person and explore larger worlds. " While Chabon later seemed to follow Yardley's advice in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), an ambitious historical novel which earned him the Pulitzer Prize, this paper aims to reconsider Wonder Boys by drawing on its previous criticism and analyzing it as an amalgam of the campus novel, the picaresque as well as both Grady's and James's Bildungsroman.

First things first: this is not a course in science fiction. There’s nothing wrong with science fiction, but this course is going to look at the subject of hybrid humanity from a different angle. Some of the works on our list have often (and rightly) been characterized as science fiction, but we’re going to look at them not as speculative works that offer a revised version of the present and future, but rather as works that philosophically question some of the fundamental presumptions of the boundary between the human and the superhuman along the lines of the Jewish folkloric figure of the golem. We’ll begin by reviewing the history and development of the golem, particularly as in relation to the mythic history surrounding Rabbi Judah Loew in sixteenth-century Prague. Then we’ll move forward in time to look at how recent writers have incorporated artificial humans into their fictions at moments when “ordinary” humanity is perceived as inadequate and also at the consequences that they suggest follow hard upon the heels of such attempts at transcending our nature

This class explores the art of escape as performance and as a literary trope, and the determining role Jewish artists played in this art's conception and history. Throughout the semester, we will contemplate the social meaning of escapology and its representations in art. We will also discuss the historical circumstances that drove Jewish artists to take part in performative bondage that ties together magic, stunt work, mass entertainment, and anti-fascist sensibilities. By the semester's end, we will reflect on the afterlife of escape art, and the ways the creators in question are remembered in contemporary social consciousness. These endeavors will mostly focus on the life and works of four Jewish artists who performed, wrote, and illustrated the art of escapology: Harry

In March of this year, I traveled with over 30 Orthodox Jewish community leaders on the Am Echad mission to Israel. Our delegation met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Ruby Rivlin, and Cabinet and Knesset members to give voice to the Orthodox community’s viewpoints. We argued that the strongest base of support for
Israel currently comes from Orthodox Jews in America, who feel a sense of responsibility toward their brethren in their ancestral homeland. Many on the liberal end of the Jewish spectrum, in contrast, feel compelled by party politics to support the Palestinians and vocally criticize Israel.

The present paper discusses the construction of fictional spaces with particular focus on their
relationship to history by demonstrating how in Michael Chabon’s alternate history The Yiddish
Policemen’s Union, a re-configuration of geography corresponds to a re-interpretation of history.
My argument is grounded in the postmodernist construction of literature as having an ontological
dominant and I hold that the abovementioned cause-effect relationship between history and
geography engenders in the novel a fictional “space-time,” diagonal to the actual world. The latter
represents a third alternative to factuality and fictionality; therefore, it is a diagonal originating from
the intersection between the two, a universe where history and geography, as well as factuality and
counter-factuality mingle and collide. By resorting to the ubiquitous metaphor of the chess game, I
present a reading of the novel as generative literary endeavor and of the narrative as a self-sustained
space-time, grounded in two main vectors of diagonality: language and history.

This essay explores the reframing of the fiction/nonfiction distinction in light of the changing cultural dominant in the literary period succeeding postmodernism. It investigates the connection between sincerity, intersubjectivity and the breaking down of the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction in hybrid-genre narratives such as memoirs and autofictional novels. It then focuses on the link between these literary narratives and digital media presenting a study of social media platform Instagram as a (possible) prolific area of an emergent post-postmodernism. This exploration is further illustrated through the rhetorical analysis of Michael Chabon’s Instagram feed. Finally, this essay calls attention to how the blurring of the fiction/nonfiction distinction is becoming a technique employed to foreground issues of sincerity and intersubjective author-audience communication rather than of postmodern ontology.

This paper looks at the way in which Holocaust narratives explore the entity of the family as space of memory repository and, more specifically, as time-space of trans-generational transmission of traumatic memories. It focuses on Michael Chabon’s novel Moonglow as main case study and, to some extent, Art Spiegelman’s MAUS as illustrative and visual model of these mechanisms. This analysis will dwell on families of Holocaust survivors as epitome of families having to deal and come to grips with a traumatic past; a bulky heritage that permeates the everyday life of all the members, not only of those who directly experienced the tragic event. How do traumatized individuals – often suffering from PTSD, “post-traumatic stress disorder,” provoked by their involvement (in several and differing forms) in the Holocaust – relate to their kin and, especially, to their offspring? In this context, to what extent are family dynamics affected, twisted, and eventually turned dysfunctional? In what terms is the present (as well as the future) of a household shaped by, negotiated in the light of its past? These subjects will be investigated against the background of the category of “postmemory” elaborated in the 1990s by Marianne Hirsch and systematized in her seminal The Generation of Postmemory, Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012).

How did Jewish literature become American? Within approximately a century Jewish writers have established themselves as integral voices in US literature.  This course examines how this process occurred in the 20th and 21st centuries as Jewish narratives and languages encountered American modernism.  We will examine transatlantic Yiddish modernism, immigrant and proletarian fictions, Jewish high modernist novels and short stories, Sephardic crypto-Jewish tales, Mizrachi narrative, and contemporary Jewish writing on alternative futures.

Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" (2007) and Howard Jacobson's "J" (2014) are novels fixated on the survival of Jewish identity in hostile environments. Exploring the scholarly reception of these novels to form of a defense of their narrative complexity, this article focuses on themes relating to space and place. It does so by arguing that the depiction of home spaces in these novels allows for the concept of the eruv to become a guiding principle in the construction of both novels' narratives. A close reading of homes in these novels through the lens of eruvin exposes unexpected parallels between these vastly different writers, at the same time that it allows scholars to more easily fit these works into their authors' respective oeuvres. As such, these home spaces are argued to be “eruvic spaces” that serve a key narrative function in both texts, in turn enabling a reevaluation of the novels themselves.

This article presents an analysis of Michael Chabon’s Moonglow (2016) inclusive of the digital epitexts the author shared on his account on social media Instagram (2015-2018). Following a (rhetorical) co-constructive approach, the analysis shows Chabon’s combined use of digital epitexts and genre ambiguity and highlights the relevance of both narrative resources for the co-construction of Moonglow. In particular, I claim that the onomastic connections providing trauma autofictions like Moonglow with authenticity (cf. Worthington 2018) are realized through the digital epitexts on Instagram. These digital epitexts, in turn, come into being in the context of an ephemeral personal narrative, while Chabon’s use of mixed framing clues is linked with the current interest in sincerity and relationality of twenty-first-century American fiction.

This article appears in the CCAR Journal Spring 2019, which is dedicated to the memory of Aaron Panken. It offers an alternative to the typical denominational distinctions used in contemporary Jewish discourse, and relates to a recent speech by Michael Chabon.

This work explores Michael Chabon’s use in Moonglow of notions related to the uncertainty of memories, categorical thinking, and historiographic metafiction, and the intertextual connections existing between his novel and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Both the narrator’s grandfather in Chabon’s book and the protagonist of Pynchon’s masterpiece share the same quest for the ethically ambiguous rocket when WW2 is coming to its end in Europe. In both novels, the quest highlights its representational rather than actual value thanks to the use of some strategies that ultimately seem to put into question our capacity to know the past and its present consequences in reliable terms. They become a warning that epistemological difficulties should not discourage us from looking for the historical truth and, thus, make the necessary ethical choices.

This chapter explores the turn to formally conventional fiction among American writers in the 2000s. It positions this turn not as a capitulation to the norms of neoliberal capitalism, as other critics have argued, but as a formally oriented response to neoliberalism’s effects on US society since the 1970s. In the new politics of form, postmodern and avant-garde experimentalism are coded as unresponsive to an increasingly fragmented and atomistic culture, whereas the conservation of forms becomes understood as a politically progressive project. The chapter outlines this twenty-first-century politics of form using evidence from the fiction, non-fiction and interviews of several high-profile American novelists.

This paper considers declarative examples of pragmatism in the writings of author Michael Chabon and the philosopher Richard Rorty. I propose that there is evidence of considerable overlapping between the ideas of both authors, evidenced in how rhetorical questions posed in the respective texts allow for a discussion of politicised identity. What I find particularly striking is how Chabon and Rorty establish a positive reassessment of the achievability through declared reassertions of communal pride. An emphasis on the values of American heterogeneity therefore occurs in the writing of both authors at advanced stages in their respective careers. The stressing heterogenous are not merely coincidental, they are the result of a resurgent interest in rhetoric and pragmatism in Chabon's fiction, specifically the 2012 novel Telegraph Avenue. A reassessment of positive ideas of community, relating to a renewed interest in American cultural achievement, act as a response to postmodernist rhetoric in Rorty's books Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989) and Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (1998). What is of particular interest for me as an American Studies researcher is how ideas of a positive resurgence in the United States as a potentially heterogeneous democracy both predates and emerges during Barack Obama's tenure as President. A presidency which placed pragmatism and idealistic rhetoric at the core of public communications, Obama's recall of American liberal idealism was summarized in the campaign slogan "Yes We Can." The arguments this paper will analyse prioritise communal solidarity in both Chabon and Rorty's texts. In doing so I will argue that Chabon and Rorty respond to the threat of gentrification in culturally contested spaces. I will use Rorty's claim for the liberal ironist being the figure who strives for solidarity and a realization of the potentialities of American democracy. In doing so I argue how Rorty's rhetoric influences the spoken arguments made in Chabon's novel, specifically that of the role of communal solidarity as a model for critiquing gentrification.

Michael Chabon’s use of the detective genre can be perceived as a unique commentary on Jewish identity, since his two designated detectives – the old man in The Final Solution and Detective Meyer Landsman in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union – attempt to solve more than just the case they had been assigned, as Jewish themes of exile, anti-Semitism and assimilation loom in the background. While The Final Solution casts the classic detective genre within the framework of a Holocaust narrative, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a mix of alternative history and the hard-boiled detective genre. In fact, the unique generic hybridity of both texts toys with the reader’s expectations and sets the stage for a narrative interpretation that focuses on the symbolic meaning of various generic subversions and the metaphorical value Chabon assigns to his protagonists. Accordingly, this essay examines how the generic subversions of the classic and hard-boiled detective story help to explore the implicit roles of the protagonists and their analogy to the plots of The Final Solution and The Yiddish Policemen's Union in relation to Jewish identity.