Reconfiguring the wanderer: Jewishness, twentieth-century literature, and the political imagination (Djuna Barnes, Walter Benjamin)

This dissertation examines the nexus between twentieth-century literary and political interpretations of the figure of the “wandering Jew,” interpretations themselves shaped by trends in Jewish immigration and assimilation. I argue that there is a metaphorical history of Jewish migration, expressed on the level of the structure of literary and political texts, that can be understood alongside the history of actual immigration. This “structural diaspora” produces rhetorical and political consequences long after the “wandering Jew” has vanished from most twentieth century public discourses.; Chapter One examines the “Aliens Acts” (1901–05). In these British anti-immigration laws, “Jewishness” becomes “wandering Jewishness,” a set of characteristics no longer connected to actual Jews, but nonetheless politically and rhetorically useful for anti-immigrationist platforms. Chapter Two focuses on how modernist writers, specifically Djuna Barnes, used this ambiguous fluidity of the Jew to experiment with narrative structure. Barnes's treatment of the Jew is tied to Anglo-American Modernism's philosemitic interest in the literary productivity of Jewish traits. In Chapter Three, I turn to Walter Benjamin's writings on flânerie to illustrate an increasing discontinuity between wandering and Jewishness in the developing modernist imagination. For Benjamin, the narrator-flâneur enters the city as an allegory of the Jew whose presence the very life of the modern city threatens to absorb. Yet, the relationship between the flâneur and Jew is never expressed directly, instead emerging as a set of problems about narrative method. In Chapter Four, I discuss the fetishization of wandering by contemporary experimental poets Giulia Niccolai and Peter Reading, whose work conceives wandering as entirely productive, even politically radical. Yet even these conceptions of wandering are saturated by prior configurations of Jewishness that governed the political meaning of wandering during the early twentieth century.; My study offers scholars in Jewish and Cultural Studies methods of interpreting ethnicity as a structural and rhetorical problem, rather than a thematic or representational one. Ultimately, I form bridges between the disparate fields of Jewish Cultural Studies and English and American Modernism while taking into account contemporary poetic practices that inherit Modernist concerns.