Strange Paradise: Wrestling with the Golem and Double Idolatry in Cynthia Ozick's Puttermesser Papers
This article reads the stories of the paradise and the golem in Cynthia Ozick's novel Puttermesser Papers. I argue that these two intertwined stories, the dystopian utopia of the paradise and the birth and death of the golem, encapsulate the author's endeavour to wrestle with the idolatry...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press
[2015]
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| In: |
Literature and theology
Year: 2015, Volume: 29, Issue: 1, Pages: 66-85 |
| RelBib Classification: | BH Judaism CD Christianity and Culture |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Resolving-System) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | This article reads the stories of the paradise and the golem in Cynthia Ozick's novel Puttermesser Papers. I argue that these two intertwined stories, the dystopian utopia of the paradise and the birth and death of the golem, encapsulate the author's endeavour to wrestle with the idolatry of aesthetic culture and that of pagan nature. From her rather idiosyncratic perspective of anti-idolatry, Ozick challenges the transcendent claims of the modern Western cult of literature/art in revealing the utopia of literary imagination as ultimately dystopian on the one hand, while on the other, endeavours to reconfigure the relationship between Jewish monotheism and its pagan other by narrating the story of the golem with much ambiguities and ambivalence. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4623 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Literature and theology
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/litthe/fru038 |