| Cynthia Ozick(1928—),an American Jewish woman writer,is one of the most outstanding Jewish novelists in contemporary America.She has published six novels,seven short stories,eight collections of essays and a script.Ozick insists on Jewish identity in her writing,and her work shows a strong Jewishness such as mental state and identity dilemma of the Jews.She insists on the traditional Jewish morality and the law of anti-idolatry.She also calls on people to embrace their national identity,reject cultural assimilation and revive the Jewish culture.As a revivalist who advocated for the Jewish nation,Ozick played an important role in contemporary American Jewish literature and gave Jews a sense of cultural belonging in contemporary society.In addition to Jewish subjects,the language and rhetoric of Ozick’s novels also have a high literary value.Ozick’s masterpiece The Pagan Rabbi has distinctive features in rhetoric.From the perspective of rhetoric,this paper analyzes words,sentences and metaphors in the novel,the rhetoric techniques and rhetoric effects,as well as the connotation it reflected to author’s intention.This thesis comprises three parts: introduction,text and conclusion.The introduction introduces Cynthia Ozick’s works,presents the domestic and foreign research on Ozick.then summarizes the study of rhetoric and style in Ozick’s novels in order to show the research status.The main text is divided into four chapters.First demonstrate the historical and direct reasons for the formation of her rhetorical devices.Then analyze the rhetorical devices of The Pagan Rabbi from the perspective of words,sentences and paragraphs,Lastly,try to elucidate the meaning of the novel.The first chapter analyzes the influencing factors of the rhetorical style of Ozick’s novels,explores the causes of its rhetorical strategies from the aspects of historical and cultural background and realistic influence,and mainly expounds the exegetical tradition of Judaism and the influence of writer Henry James on Ozick’s writing style.The second chapter studies from a micro perspective and analyzes the word selection and the grammatical breakthrough of single sentences in The Pagan Rabbi.The combination of synonyms,antonyms and adjectives forms a word group,producing multiple semantic effects.The long sentences and the expression methods that violate grammatical norms bring special expressions to grammatical breakthroughs.The third chapter studies from a macro perspective and analyzes the multilingual writing phenomenon in The Pagan Rabbi,introduces the effects of different languages on people’s characters construction,and explores the emotional attitude behind multilingual writing;summarizes the style of Ozick’s description of pagan god and pagan culture,and makes an study of the cultural connotation behind different stylistic choices by the way of quoting Torah’s sermon in the novel.The fourth chapter discusses the Jewish moral significance and cultural connotation in the rhetorical form of The Pagan Rabbi.On the one hand,the pagan rabbi is a warning to the Jewish spiritual world under the assimilation,on the other hand,Ozick shows her skepticism.Ozick’s Jewishness rhetoric novels compete for a place in the history of western literature.Ozick’s Jewish cultural standpoint opposes the dual opposition between Jewish civilization and world civilization,and tries to put forward the possible development direction of Jewish civilization in the era of globalization.The conclusion part briefly summarizes the rhetorical strategies of Ozick’s novels,explores the reflection of this rhetorical strategy on Ozick’s Jewish concept and emphasizes Ozick’s national stance on the assimilation crisis faced by the contemporary Jewish nation and the Jewish law.Ozick’s novels have distinct rhetoric characteristics,and also contain a tenacious Jewish core.Ozick calls for innovation and voices for Jews in American literature on the basis of reviving tradition.From form to connotation,it is worthy of more attention from domestic scholars. |
