Leslie Fiedler

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Leslie Fiedler (1967)

Leslie Fiedler (born March 8, 1917 in Newark , New Jersey , † January 29, 2003 in Buffalo , New York ) was an American literary scholar and literary critic .

He is known for his contributions to genre theory and Jewish-American literature and is considered to be one of the pioneers of gender and queer studies . He also introduced the term postmodernism in literary studies.

Life

Fiedler initially studied literature at New York University , where he received a BA degree in 1939 . At the University of Wisconsin he received his MA in 1939 and a Ph. D. in 1941. From 1941 to 1963 he taught at the University of Montana , then until his death at the State University of New York at Buffalo . Numerous lecture tours have taken him around the world. Fiedler spoke numerous languages ​​and served as an interpreter and translator for Japanese in the United States Army from 1943 to 1945 during World War II . He was married twice and had three daughters and three sons.

Fiedler made a name for himself early on as a decidedly sharp-tongued and contentious polemicist . While he was attracted to socialism at a young age , with the emerging Cold War he turned into a staunch anti-communist. In 1953, in the first issue of the CIA- funded political magazine Encounter, he provided a posthumous broadside to the executed spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg , who even the editors found too brutal to reprint a soothing preface to the article.

He became a national celebrity after Ernest Hemingway's suicide in 1961, whom Fiedler had recently visited at his home in Idaho ; his rather sardonic account of the decline of the "great old man" of American literature was reprinted many times.

In the Federal Republic of Germany, Fiedler became known - more or less - primarily through a lecture given in the summer of 1968 at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg . Fiedler presented his famous text "Cross the Border - Close the Gap" for the first time at a public symposium, in which he proclaimed (literary) postmodernism and declared (literary) modernity dead. In September 1968, the lecture, revised in two parts, appears in the larger weekly newspaper Christ und Welt . After the publication it comes to the "Fiedler Debate", in which well-known German-speaking authors, u. a. Martin Walser , Reinhard Baumgart and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann participate. However, the debate did not show any major after-effects.

In 1988 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

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In 1948, Fiedler published the provocative article Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey in the Partisan Review , in which he investigated homoerotic subtexts in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Herman Melville's Moby Dick . He also examined the precarious relationship of American society and literature to sexuality and race in his work, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), which is probably best known to this day . In it he stated that the American novel has been misogynous , if not womenless, since its inception, while the central theme of European literature is love between men and women. Already in Washington Irving's short story Rip Van Winkle , the protagonist flees from his quarrelsome wife into the woods, and in James Fenimore Cooper's Der Wildtöter , Lederstockpf declines to marry Judith Hutter in order to continue enjoying the freedom of the pioneer and ranger's life. The American writer, according to Fiedler, fled for fear of marriage to the world of his youth, at sea, or to the American West. So it happens that the classics of American literature often represent pure male societies and homoerotic tendencies became formative, for example in Herman Melville's Moby Dick , in which the sailor Ishmael enters into a kind of marriage with the Polynesian harpooner Queequeg . Even in the literature of American modernism, such as the work of Ernest Hemingway , William Faulkner and Nathanael West, there are hardly any intact marriages to be found.

In other works, too, Fiedler sought to trace archetypal patterns, particularly in American literature, and thus made an important contribution to genre and myth theory .

With Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self , he presented a cultural history of physical deformations in 1978; he examined the role of wolf children , bearded women, dwarfs, giants, Siamese twins and other supposed "monsters" in literature and history.

Works

  • An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and Politics (1955)
  • The Art of the Essay (1958)
  • No! In Thunder: Essays on Myth and Literature (1960)
  • Love and Death in the American Novel (1960; revised edition 1966)
  • The Second Stone: A Love Story (1963)
  • Waiting for the End: The Crisis in American Culture and a Report on Twentieth-Century American Literature (1964)
  • Back to China (1965)
  • The Continuing Debate: Essays on Education (1966)
  • The Last Jew in America (1966)
  • The Return of the Vanishing American (1968)
    • The return of the missing American, German by Wolfgang Ignée and Michael Stone; March, Frankfurt 1970. ISBN 3-499-15686-5
  • Nude Croquet: The Stories of Leslie A. Fiedler (short stories; 1969)
  • Being Busted (1969)
  • The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler (Two volumes; 1971)
  • The Stranger in Shakespeare (1972)
  • The Messengers Will Come No More (1974)
  • A Fiedler Reader (1977)
  • Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (1978), Anchor, January 1, 1993, ISBN 978-0385470131
  • The Inadvertent Epic: From "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to "Roots" (1980)
  • What Was Literature? Class Culture and Mass Society (1982)
  • Fiedler on the Roof: Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity (199l)
  • Tyranny of the Normal: Essays on Bioethics, Theology and Myth (1996)

literature

  • Steven G. Kellman, Irving Malin (Eds.): Leslie Fiedler and American Culture. University of Delaware Press, Newark 1999, ISBN 0-87413-689-X .
  • Mark Royden Winchell: "Too Good to Be True". The Life And Work Of Leslie Fiedler. University of Missouri Press, Columbia 2002, ISBN 0-8262-1389-8 .
  • Danny Walther: The “Fiedler Debate” or a little attempt to write down the “Cipher 1968” a little from the left. Leipzig 2007. ( Abstract and full text online) (Based on the so-called "Fiedler Debate" of 1968, the tension between (revolutionary) politics, art, literature and aesthetics is extensively examined.)
  • Prem Kumari Srivastava: Leslie Fiedler. Critic, Provocateur, Pop Culture Guru. McFarland, 2014, ISBN 9780786463510 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Members: Leslie Fiedler. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 28, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Fiddler, Leslie
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American literary scholar and literary critic
DATE OF BIRTH March 8, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Newark , New Jersey
DATE OF DEATH January 29, 2003
Place of death Buffalo , New York