The goal of this panel is to assess the work of a major American essayist, Cynthia Ozick, with an eye to what Ozick’s nonfiction writing can reveal about the affordances and constraints of the contemporary literary essay. This session will examine particularly themes that overlap in Ozick’s essays and fiction, among them memory, cultural transmission, canon formation, style, influence, and the state of Jewish-American literature and culture. The current prestige of the essay form and “essayistic” fiction — developed most recently by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Ben Lerner and Rachel Cusk, among others — prompts us to re-assess Ozick’s importance as a novelist-critic and her place as an elder stateswoman of American letters. What lessons does this 94-year-old master provide? In its quality and scope, Ozick’s nonfiction bears comparison with the work of Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Hardwick, William Gass, and other leading American critics; it is a substantial contribution to American and Jewish letters.

Beginning with her 1974 first-person essay “All the World Wants the Jews Dead,” her formidable career in nonfiction has spanned nearly half a century of stylish audacity, indignation, and insight. The panel’s interventions will unlock new perspectives on the state of the essayist’s art and look through the lens of Ozick’s seven essay collections to reveal fresh angles on her distinguished, multi-generic work (poetry, novels, short stories, drama, translation). Ours promises to be a major intervention in the field, leading the way for further analysis of her oeuvre in light of Yale’s recent acquisition of her papers, which will be processed by spring 2023.

The organizer is well-positioned to lead this session. She is co-editing a special issue on Ozick for Studies in American Jewish Literature. She researches the long aftermath of nineteenth-century literary culture and high modernism. Ozick, a self-described acolyte of Henry James, is a vital part of this long legacy and of the history of Jewish, American and European criticism.

Chaired by Ozick scholar Michaela Bronstein, the panel will illuminate Ozick and her various twentieth and twenty-first century contexts, reconceptualizing conventional understandings of her work in the light of recent artistic and critical developments. Existing scholarship on Ozick’s work is dispersed across multiple subfields. Ozick has received attention from scholars of Jewish-American literature, scholars working on Henry James and his legacy, and scholars of the essay as a literary form. This panel promises to bring these subfields into conversation. The session will draw on a range of critical methodologies, enlisting sociological, theological, and formalist approaches to refine the scholarly understanding of Ozick’s work.

Our first panelist, Na’amit Sturm Nagel, links Ozick’s literary criticism to methods of rabbinical interpretation. Her paper argues that Ozick’s essay “Ruth,” in which Biblical and familial genealogies overlap and intersect, intricately draws on Talmudic theories of time.

Next, Harriet Smith Hughes places Ozick’s celebration of the pleasures of the essay form in relation to the long-running Best American Essays anthology series. The forewords and introductions to the Best American anthologies routinely stress the hybrid and ungovernable qualities of the essay form, while at the same time assimilating the essay into a project of canon formation and institutional legitimation. Ozick’s emphasis on the historical specifics of the essay as it is practiced offers a way out of this contradiction.

Charlie Tyson argues that Ozick’s repeated descriptions, in essays and interviews, of herself as a literary failure (despite abundant evidence to the contrary) alerts us to the outsized role of failure in her thought more generally. Her acts of self-negation give force to her recurrent laments that literature, the object in which she has engrafted herself, is itself marginal and in eclipse. Ozick’s preoccupation with failure has large effects on her literary criticism, in which the precariousness of recognition and the waning of literary fame are central issues.

Finally, Michèle Mendelssohn calls attention to Ozick’s debt to melodrama, revealing the theatrical structure that governs Ozick’s essays on Anne Frank, Henry James, and other figures. The moral absolutism, histrionic tenor, and all-or-nothing stakes of these essays speak to Ozick’s melodramatic imagination. Her integration of melodramatic tactics into the essay form allows her to achieve powerful, if manipulative, emotional effects, and permits her to usher nineteenth-century literary strategies into contemporary prose.

Timings: MLA Commons pre-circulated papers will ensure ample discussion time (22 minutes). All panelists will be introduced at the start (5 minutes). Each will give a 10 minute overview with 2 minutes for transitions. The panel will last 75 minutes (22 + 5 + 40 + 8 = 75) ensuring a prompt finish.