Ethnic Modernisms: Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Dislocation

by Delia Caparoso Konzett

This study explores a new understanding of modernism and ethnicity as put forward in the transnational and diasporic writings of Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Rhys. In its selection of three modernists from apparently different cultural backgrounds, it is meant to make us rethink the role of modernism in terms of ethnicity and displacement. Konzett critiques the traditional understanding of the monocultural 'ethnic identity' often highlighted in the studies of these writers and argues that all three writers are better understood as ironic narrators of diaspora and movement and as avant-garde modernists. As a result, they offer an alternative aesthetics of modernism which is centered around the innovative narration of displacement. Her analysis of the complexities of language and form and impact of the complex and ambiguous formal styles of the three writers on the history of their reception is a model of the effective integration of formalist, historicist, and theoretical perspectives in literary criticism.

202 pages, Hardcover

First published November 9, 2002

Reviews

[sdw · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Only as we come to view all ethnicity as linked to migration and, vice versa, all migration linked to forms of ethnicity, do we begin to understand that so-called native cultures are in fact always already construed and open to demographic regrouping and cultural reconstitution at any point in history. To paraphrase Adorno, we begin to realize that no one is rightfully at home” (Konzett5).

This book opens with a reading of dislocation and exile in Henry James's American Scene in relation to his anxieties about immigration. The book aims not to examine ethnicity and modernism in writers like James, but to read Yezierska, Hurston, and Rhys. As the title suggests, Konzett is concerned with an "aesthetics of dislocation" which she believes emerges through the langauge choices of the writers (such as Yezierska's blending of English and Yiddish). She explains that she chose writers whose texts and receptions were contradictory and complex to prevent a reductionist reading of ethnicity and modernism.