The University of Wisconsin Press


Literature & Criticism / Judaica


 

Jewish Writing and the Deep Places of the Imagination
Mark Krupnick
Edited by Jean K. Carney and Mark Shechner

Deeply personal dialogues with Jewish American writers, from Mark Krupnick in his final work

When he learned he had ALS and roughly two years to live, literary critic Mark Krupnick returned to the writers who had been his lifelong conversation partners and asked with renewed intensity: how do you live as a Jew, when, mostly, you live in your head? The evocative and sinuous essays collected here are the products of this inquiry. In his search for durable principles, Krupnick follows Lionel Trilling, Cynthia Ozick, Geoffrey Hartman, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and others into the elemental matters of life and death, sex and gender, power and vulnerability.

The editors—Krupnick's wife, Jean K. Carney, and literary critic Mark Shechner—have also included earlier essays and introductions that link Krupnick's work with the "deep places" of his own imagination.

"Mark Krupnick's great gift as a critic was his knack for cutting through the elaborate disguises writers throw up and seeing those writers as struggling human beings like the rest of us. This gift is beautifully on display in Mark's wonderful and amazing final book."—Gerald Graff, University of Illinois at Chicago

Mark Krupnick (1939–2003) was professor in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, editor of Displacement: Derrida and After, and author of Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism and more than two hundred essays and reviews.

Media & bookseller inquiries regarding review copies, events, and interviews can be directed to the publicity department at publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu or (608) 263-0734. (If you want to examine a book for possible course use, please see our Course Books page. If you want to examine a book for possible rights licensing, please see Rights & Permissions.)

the cover of Krupnick's book is illustrated with an old sepia photo of a father holding his boy on his shoulder as they both look up to the heavens

November 2005
LC: 2005008262 PS
344 pp.  6 x 9

Book icon
Cloth $26.95 t
ISBN 978-0-299-21440-1
Shopping cart ADD TO CART
  Review cart contents
Secure checkout

 

Home | Books | Journals | Events | Textbooks | Authors | Related | Search | Order | Contact

If you have trouble accessing any page in this web site, contact our Web manager.
E-mail: webmaster@uwpress.wisc.edu.

Updated March 19, 2010

© 2010, The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System