Download Free Ethnicity And Ethnic Identity In Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Ethnicity And Ethnic Identity In Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex and write the review.

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,5, University of Hannover (Englisches Seminar), 36 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Instead of investigating the most obvious aspect of the novel, namely gender identity, this work focuses on the ethnic novel Middlesex with its particular interpretation of ethnicity and ethnic identity. These assumed marginal aspects are of unique importance when it comes to their relationship with the main theme of the book - gender identity. The concept of Greekness in the novel is not just a side effect or accidentally connected to the hermaphrodite story: the connection is clear as the hermaphrodite myth goes back to the Greeks. What Americanness means to the protagonist and the individual characters in the novel; whether they would see themselves as hyphenated Americans or not are questions tangled in this paper. Middlesex is a novel that overflows with different notions of ethnic representation, ethnic identity, ethnic struggle and self-fashioning. Identity is nothing fixed but always changing as it is subject to choice and self-invention. Eugenides depicts an overarching concept of the new man/woman in the sense that the hermaphrodite Zora's statement "'Because we're what's next.'" (552) is the central message.
Spanning eight decades and chronicling the wild ride of a Greek-American family through the vicissitudes of the twentieth century, Jeffrey Eugenides’ witty, exuberant novel on one level tells a traditional story about three generations of a fantastic, absurd, lovable immigrant family -- blessed and cursed with generous doses of tragedy and high comedy. But there’s a provocative twist. Cal, the narrator -- also Callie -- is a hermaphrodite. And the explanation for this takes us spooling back in time, through a breathtaking review of the twentieth century, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie’s grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set our narrator’s life in motion. Middlesex is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. It’s a brilliant exploration of divided people, divided families, divided cities and nations -- the connected halves that make up ourselves and our world.
Written in the 1840s and published here for the first time, Julia Ward Howe's novel about a hermaphrodite is unlike anything of its time--or, in truth, of our own. Narrated by Laurence, who is raised and lives as a man, is loved by men and women alike, and can respond to neither, this unconventional story explores the understanding "that fervent hearts must borrow the disguise of art, if they would win the right to express, in any outward form, the internal fire that consumes them." Laurence describes his repudiation by his family, his involvement with an attractive widow, his subsequent wanderings and eventual attachment to a sixteen-year-old boy, his own tutelage by a Roman nobleman and his sisters, and his ultimate reunion with his early love. His is a story unique in nineteenth-century American letters, at once a remarkable reflection of a largely hidden inner life and a richly imagined tale of coming of age at odds with one's culture. Howe wrote "The Hermaphrodite" when her own marriage was challenged by her husband's affection for another man--and when prevailing notions regarding a woman's appropriate role in patriarchal structures threatened Howe's intellectual and emotional survival. The novel allowed Howe, and will now allow her readers, to occupy a speculative realm otherwise inaccessible in her historical moment.
Nothing is "pure" in America, and, indeed, the rich ethnic mix that constitutes our society accounts for much of its amazing vitality. Werner Sollors's new book takes a wide-ranging look at the role of "ethnicity" in American literature and what that literature has said--and continues to say--about our diverse culture. Ethnic consciousness, he contends, is a constituent feature of modernism, not modernism's antithesis. Discussing works from every period of American history, Sollors focuses particularly on the tension between "descent" and "consent"--between the concern for one's racial, ethnic, and familial heritage and the conflicting desire to choose one's own destiny, even if that choice goes against one's heritage. Some of the stories Sollors examines are retellings of the biblical Exodus--stories in which Americans of the most diverse origins have painted their own histories as an escape from bondage or a search for a new Canaan. Other stories are "American-made" tales of melting-pot romance, which may either triumph in intermarriage, accompanied by new world symphonies, or end with the lovers' death. Still other stories concern voyages of self-discovery in which the hero attempts to steer a perilous course between stubborn traditionalism and total assimilation. And then there are the generational sagas, in which, as if by magic, the third generation emerges as the fulfillment of their forebears' dream. Citing examples that range from the writings of Cotton Mather to Liquid Sky (a "post-punk" science fiction film directed by a Russian emigre), Sollors shows how the creators of American culture have generally been attracted to what is most new and modern. About the Author: Werner Sollors is Chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard University and the author of Amiri Baraka: The Quest for a Populist Modernism. A provocative and original look at "ethnicity" in American literature DTCovers stories from all periods of our nation's history DTRelates ethnic literature to the principle of literary modernism DT"Grave and hilarious, tender and merciless...The book performs a public service."-Quentin Anderson
African Americans once passed as whites to escape the pains of racism. Today's neo-passing has pushed the old idea of passing in extraordinary new directions. A white author uses an Asian pen name; heterosexuals live "out" as gay; and, irony of ironies, whites try to pass as black. Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Ashanti Young present essays that explore practices, performances, and texts of neo-passing in our supposedly postracial moment. The authors move from the postracial imagery of Angry Black White Boy and the issues of sexual orientation and race in ZZ Packer's short fiction to the politics of Dave Chappelle's skits as a black President George W. Bush. Together, the works reveal that the questions raised by neo-passing—questions about performing and contesting identity in relation to social norms—remain as relevant today as in the past. Contributors: Derek Adams, Christopher M. Brown, Martha J. Cutter, Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Michele Elam, Alisha Gaines, Jennifer Glaser, Allyson Hobbs, Brandon J. Manning, Loran Marsan, Lara Narcisi, Eden Osucha, Gayle Wald, and Deborah Elizabeth Whaley
Proudly presenting the widely anticipated new work of fiction from the multi-award winning bestselling author of Middlesex--a #1 major bestseller in Canada--and The Marriage Plot--also an acclaimed national bestseller--and the beloved The Virgin Suicides. Featuring unseen stories from one of the most eclectic, dynamic fiction writers working today, Fresh Complaint brings together works both new and previously published--including the crème de la crème of Eugenides's beloved New Yorker stories, never before collected between two covers. Jeffrey Eugenides's bestselling novels have shown that he is an astute observer of the crises of adolescence, sexual identity, self-discovery, family love and what it means to be an American in our times. The stories in Fresh Complaint continue that tradition. Ranging from the reproductive antics of "Baster" to the wry, moving account of a young traveller's search for enlightenment in "Air Mail" (selected by Annie Proulx for The Best American Short Stories 1997), this collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national crises. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people's wealth during the real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art collapse under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; and, in "Bronze," a sexually confused college freshman whose encounter with a stranger on a train leads to a revelation about his past and his future. Narratively compelling, beautifully written and packed with a density of ideas that belie their fluid grace, Fresh Complaint proves Eugenides to be a master of the short form as well as the long. Showcasing stories from as far back as the 1980s and as recently as 2017, Fresh Complaint is the career-spanning collection from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
Combining theoretical and empirical pieces, this book explores the emerging theoretical work seeking to describe hybrid identities while also illustrating the application of these theories in empirical research.The sociological perspective of this volume sets it apart. Hybrid identities continue to be predominant in minority or immigrant communities, but these are not the only sites of hybridity in the globalized world. Given a compressed world and a constrained state, identities for all individuals and collective selves are becoming more complex. The hybrid identity allows for the perpetuation of the local, in the context of the global. This book presents studies of types of hybrid identities: transnational, double consciousness, gender, diaspora, the third space, and the internal colony. Contributors include: Keri E. Iyall Smith, Patrick Gun Cuninghame, Judith R. Blau, Eric S. Brown, Fabienne Darling-Wolf, Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, Melissa F. Weiner, Bedelia Nicola Richards, Keith Nurse, Roderick Bush, Patricia Leavy, Trinidad Gonzales, Sharlene Hesse-Biber, Emily Brooke Barko, Tess Moeke-Maxwell, Helen Kim, Bedelia Nicola Richards, Helene K. Lee, Alex Frame, Paul Meredith, David L. Brunsma and Daniel J. Delgado.
A New York Times Notable Book of 2011 A Publisher's Weekly Top 10 Book of 2011 A Kirkus Reviews Top 25 Best Fiction of 2011 Title One of Library Journal's Best Books of 2011 A Salon Best Fiction of 2011 title One of The Telegraph's Best Fiction Books of the Year 2011 It's the early 1980s—the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. As Madeleine tries to understand why "it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France," real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead—charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy—suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old "friend" Mitchell Grammaticus—who's been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange—resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate. Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology Laboratory on Cape Cod, but can't escape the secret responsible for Leonard's seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love. Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.
A diverse set of texts from Foucault, Weber, Derrida and others are examined in this reconceptualization of the way ethnicity functions in capitalist society.
The crossing of borders and frontiers between political states and between languages and cultures continues to inhibit and bedevil the freedom of movement of both ideas and people. This book addresses the issues arising from problems of translation and communication, the understanding of identity in hyphenated cultures, the relationship between landscape and character, and the multiplex topic of gender transition. Literature as a key to identity in borderland situations is explored here, together with analyses of semiotics, narratives of madness and abjection. The volume also examines the contemporary refugee crisis through first-hand “Personal Witness” accounts of migration, and political, ethnic and religious divisions in Kosovo, Greece, Portugal and North America. Another section, gathering together historical and current “Poetry of Exile”, offers poets’ perspectives on identity and tradition in the context of loss, alienation, fear and displacement.