From Anxiety to Disidentification: Lara Vapnyar's MEMOIRS OF A MUSE, Irina Reyn's WHAT HAPPENED TO ANNA K. and Anya Ulinich's LENA FINKLE'S MAGIC BARREL

• In Event: Dis/locating Recent Post-Soviet Jewish American Literature

Abstract

This presentation explores literary influences that manifest in a selection of Russian-Jewish-American novels, specifically Lara Vapnyar's MEMOIRS OF A MUSE (2006), Irina Reyn's WHAT HAPPENED TO ANNA K. (2008) and Anya Ulinich's LENA FINKLE'S MAGIC BARREL (2014). These texts engage with Russian and Jewish-American literary predecessors, including Lev Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud. I argue that José Esteban Muñoz's theory of “disidentification” helps deconstruct these conflicted engagements, which depend on both the appropriation and rewriting of literary and social scripts. Specifically, the complex intertextuality of Ulinich's, Vapnyar's and Reyn's novels functions as means of subverting norms surrounding women's sexuality, Jews' status in Russian literature and relations between Russian-Jewish immigrants and their Jewish-American hosts.

Author

• Margarita Levantovskaya, Santa Clara University