Language:
English
Year of publication:
2018
Titel der Quelle:
Shofar; an Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
36,3 (2018) 1-30
Keywords:
Qashu, Sayed,
;
Roth, Philip.
;
Hebrew fiction Palestinian Arab authors
;
History and criticism
;
American fiction Jewish authors
;
History and criticism
;
Doubles in literature
;
Subjectivity in literature
;
Group identity in literature
Abstract:
The proliferation of doppelgängers and other doubles in Sayed Kashua's Second Person Singular (2010) and Philip Roth's Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993) suggests that the demands and expectations of national identity threaten the subjectivity of those who try to resist it. In both novels, paranoia and the abject unsettle the boundaries of subjectivity and contribute to the disequilibrium of the mind and the fragmentation of the body. Damaged bodies signify the disintegrating selves of characters who try in vain to overcome the limitations imposed on them by ideological paradigms of identity itself; paranoia is the psychological expression of the seemingly stable "I." Paranoia and abjection-simultaneously the reason for and the consequence of the doublings and splits in these novels-indicate identity's encroachment on subjectivity. As such, these novels, though divergent in some aspects of their confrontation with identity, invoke similar phenomena to mount a scathing critique of nationalist logic.
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