A Study On Spatial Narratives In Enemies,A Love Story

Singer（1904-1991）,the winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature,is universally recognized as one of the most influential American Jewish writers of the20^thcentury.Enemies a love story is his first novel with its setting in America,and it is one of the representatives of Singer’s literary creation with the Holocaust as the central theme.Through the delineation of Herman’s entanglement with three women,this novel conveys the crisis Jewish Holocaust survivors are confronted with and the possibility of maintaining the Jewish faith in Post-Holocaust America.To date,domestic and foreign scholars mainly study it from ethnicity,feminism,the theme of the Holocaust and literary ethics,but less attention is paid to its spatial features.Given this,this paper aims to analyze the characteristics of spatial narratives from both form and content levels,exploring how spatial writings reflect the possibility of the formation of subjectivity by Jewish characters.This paper is divided into five parts.The introduction sketches Singer’s life and works,giving a brief and comprehensive overview of the current research status of his works while elucidating the related theories on spatiality.The main body is divided into three chapters.The first Chapter starts from the narrated spaces by analyzing the physical space represented by New York City,the Polish countryside and German Refugee Camp,the psychological space in the forms of the reliving of the Holocaust,the illusion of taking revenge on Nazis and the imagination of Polish homeland as well as the social space embodied by sexism,the Jewish tradition and capitalism.The second Chapter focuses on spatial techniques of fragmentation and juxtaposition by discussing how they are utilized to achieve spatial effects.The third Chapter elaborates on how the spatial narratives highlight Jewish themes.For one thing,it analyzes the Jewish characters’identity crisis under the spatial transformation and belief crisis under the restriction of spatial power.For another,it explores two means of subject formation for Jewish Holocaust survivors.The final part concludes that spatial narratives not only enrich the plot designs and characterizations of Enemies,a Love Story,but also further deepen the themes,exemplified by the survival crisis of the loss of faith and the unclear identities that Jewish Holocaust survivors are confronted with in the Post-Holocaust America.