Sharon B. Oster is professor of English at the University of Redlands. Her essays on American, Jewish, and Holocaust literature have appeared in English Literary History and Prooftexts.
No Place in Time is rife with insightful readings of key literary
and historical texts. It is a valuable project for rethinking the
poetics and politics of American realism through the lens of time.
Oster's exploration of various authors who sought to disrupt
"realism's own historicity" by introducing various modes of
"religious, sacred time" invites us to transcend the binary between
secular and sacred time and to acknowledge the modernist qualities
that, to varying degrees, these works all possess. Overall, this is
a thoughtful and impressive book, one that will be useful to
scholars working in Jewish studies, American studies, and novel
theory. It provides a foundational discussion of how Jewishness was
timed during the mass migration era and beyond, and it traces the
socio-aesthetic grammars that determined, to use Oster's language,
how the story of the Jew in time can be told.--Danny Luzon "The
American Jewish Archives Journal"
No Place in Time offers a bold, theoretical refiguring of American
literary typology, recasting a national religious mythology from
the perspective of Jewish American literary history. With fresh and
penetrating scholarship, Oster hits all the central but critically
evasive literary categories embedded in the nation's Protestant
imaginary. She reorients our understanding to such thematic
touchstones as secularism, modernity, millennialism, religious
determinism, trans-diasporic memory, and messianism in the works of
writers culturally or cooptively inflected by Rabbinical tradition
and Jewish immigrant culture. This story of the pluralities and
contradictions in the literary formation of the 'American' self is
as relevant today as it was more than a century ago.--Gregory S.
Jackson "Rutgers University"
[Oster's] analyses point to something distinctly new under the
sun.--Julian Levinson "AJS Review"
Full of splendid insight and erudition, No Place in Time offers a
striking new way to understand American literary realism. By
focusing on how the figure of the 'noble Hebrew' implanted notions
of sacred time into a genre long considered resolutely secular,
Sharon B. Oster shows how Jewishness was a central element of the
way realist writers--Jewish and non-Jewish writers alike--mediated
the fractured nature of modern American life and struggled to
imagine a redemptive future. Oster has written a truly accomplished
and important book.--Nancy Bentley "University of Pennsylvania"
Moving far beyond familiar assertions of philo- and antisemitism in
turn-of-the-century American writing, Sharon B. Oster's splendid
book shows how, for writers from James and Wharton to Cahan and
Yezierska, the figure of the Jew offered a way to think through and
reframe modern conceptions of temporality. The result is a study
that makes a powerful, beautifully argued case for the centrality
of writing Jewishness to an entire, crucial era in American
literary and cultural history.--Jennifer Luise Fleissner "Indiana
University"
This highly recommended book will be equally useful for scholars of
Jewish American culture and folks just interested in the peculiar
ways Jews have been and continue to be perceived in America. No
Place in Time illuminates the great promise of Jewish renewal in
the twentieth century, a process that, Oster shows, continues,
however fitfully, to this day.--Ezra Cappell "American Jewish
History"
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