| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,000,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,000,000)
Fiscal Year 2005: ¥800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000)
Fiscal Year 2004: ¥1,200,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,200,000)
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| Research Abstract |
In the late 1960s, feminist criticism and multiculturalism influenced the canon reformation of American literature, as a result of which a number of literary works written by women, African Americans, and other minority writers were recognized as literary canon. The inclusion of historically marginalized works into canon ignited the backlash of cultural conservatives like William Bennett and Allan Bloom, leading to a fierce debate between canon reformers and cultural conservatives.
In my study, I focus, firstly, on the curriculum revision of general education course at Stanford University and on the publication of The Heath Anthology of American literature, and examine what was discussed in the canon debate. The debate involved issues like esthetic values of the literary work, the function of what Gramsci calls "hegemony" in canon formation, and the roles of social, cultural, and educational institutions in the process of canonization.
Taking the canon debate into consideration, I explore, secondly, the historical process in which Jewish American literature was highly valued and included as part of literary canon in the 1950s. My argument is based on the assumption that the canonization of Jewish American literature was promoted by Jewish people's mobility into the middle class or the upper-middle class. Thus, I turn special attention to how Eastern European Jews accumulated in America what Pierre Bourdieu calls economic and academic capital, how Jewish literary scholars established themselves in Academia, and how New York Intellectuals contributed to the canonization of Jewish American literature.
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