A Study Of American Intellectuals In American Jewish Literature Since The WWⅡ

Since the 20^th century,the American society has gradually stepped into the knowledge-economy society.The American intellectuals who are the core driving force for social development have built up their ethical identity and social status by virtue of professional knowledge and public practice.As a type of literary narrative characters,the intellectuals of the 20^th century have gradually become an important image in American Jewish literature.Paradoxically,although the American intellectuals of the 20^th century have achieved great success in real life,the American intellectuals of the 20^th century in American Jewish literature have presented a marginal,pathological and failed image.The“intellectual success phenomenon”in the American society and the“intellectual failure narrative”in American Jewish literature have constituted the cognitive distance and become the focus of this study.This paper integrates several works of American Jewish writers in the 20^th century and explores separately the identity of American intellectuals in the era of political dominance,cultural dominance and economic dominance according to the historical context by integrating the intellectual theories of politics,sociology and economics.This paper discusses not only the narrative motives and the narrative strategies of American Jewish writers on intellectual issues,but also their value criticism and ethical reflection on contemporary intellectual issues.This paper aims to objectively analyze the historical significance and cognitive limitation of postwar American Jewish literature on intellectual issues,and combines the modern market mechanism to consider the construction of intellectual identity in the 21^st century.This paper consists of five parts:the first chapter introduces the research problems,the current situation and the academic significance of the study,focusing on the evolution of the concept of intellectuals,the living conditions of American intellectuals of the 20^thcentury and the characters of intellectuals in American Jewish literature.In the following chapters,the paper divides post-war American society into three parts based on the trend of history:the political conservative-era（1945-1960）,the cultural radical-era（1960-1980）and the economic freedom-era（1981-2001）.The second chapter mainly analyzes the identity transformation and the political identification of American intellectuals in the political conservative-era through three works,including The World is a Wedding,The Catcher in the Rye and The Crucible.The third chapter mainly analyzes the identity transformation and the cultural identification of American intellectuals in the cultural radical-era through several works,including The Spinoza in the Market Street,Herzog,An American Dream,Good as Gold,Dubin’s Lives,The Zuckerman Trilogy.The fourth chapter mainly analyzes the identity transformation and the economic identification of American intellectuals in the economic freedom-era through two works,including The Human Stains and Ravelstein.The fifth chapter further analyzes the internal relationship between the intellectuals,the times,and the power on the basis of summarizing the identity construction of American intellectuals in the 20^thcentury.By virtue of the concept of“intellectual identity theory”,this chapter discusses the identity ethics and identity reconstruction of the intellectuals of the 21^st century under the market mechanism.On the whole,this paper is an empirical cultural study based on the literary texts and the social texts,which focuses on the intellectual identity problems caused by the transformation of American society in the 20^th century.By integrating the intellectual criticism of American Jewish literature and the intellectual crisis of American social development,the paper is aimed to seek out the identity construction strategy of the contemporary intellectuals in the way of interdisciplinary research.It involves not only the value selection of intellectuals,but also the ethical construction of knowledge market.On the basis of fully understanding the pros and cons of the market mechanism as well as the various demands of the intellectuals,this paper aims to seek a reasonable ethical identity for intellectuals in the era of market economy by virtue of balancing the intellectuality and the morality,the publicity and the professionalism,the material interests and the spiritual pursuit.