On different differences, or, reopening the canon of worms

When the profession of literary criticism moved in the direction of interrogating racial, classed and gendered difference in the early 1980s, it significantly omitted the category of Jewishness. But to add Jewishness – considered not as an essence but as a problematic – into the critical mix is not only to correct for this omission. It is also to make critical and theoretical interventions thicker. I gave as an example the so-called canon controversy, one which becomes more complex when the construction of the new critical literary canon by figures like Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot becomes enriched by a discussion of their relation to the fascinating, yet abjected, figure of the Jew. And I turn to the examples of Jewish critics like Auerbach and Spitzer not only for a guide to discussions about the nature of the European literary tradition in the past, but also to current efforts to rethink its place in the globalizing literary world of the present and future.