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| Format | Journal Article |
|---|---|
| Author, Analytic | Koppelman, Susan |
| Title, Analytic | The Educations of Fannie Hurst |
| Journal Title | Women's Studies International Forum |
| Date of Publication | 1987 |
| Volume ID | 10 |
| Issue ID | 5 |
| Location in Work | 503-516 |
| View Online | https://www.academia.edu/57050593/The_educations_of_Fannie_Hurst?from_sitemaps=true&version=2 |
| Abstract | Fannie Hurst (1889–1968) was a German-Jewish midwestern American writer. She wrote seventeen novels, more than two hundred short stories, and as yet uncounted film scripts, radio scripts, articles, and pamphlets. During her lifetime, Fannie Hurst's short stories were popular both with enormous audiences of “general,” that is, non-professional, readers, and with literary critics. Fannie Hurst offers scholars from the fields of American literature, American studies, Jewish studies, Black studies, women's studies, American family, social, and labor history, film, radio, and t.v. studies, and popular culture the oppurtunity to bring into focus the urban economic, family, and cultural experience of lower middle class immigrant and first generation Americans who lived during the first third of the twentieth century as that experience was portrayed in short fiction and film. Hurst's writer's imagination developed with no periods of discontinuity. There were no periods in her personal psychological and intellectual development when she was not making stories. A study of the process by which she became educated, both formally and extra-institutionally, will give us new insight into the ways that writers of fiction develop, the ways in which writers transform what they know, experience, imagine, etc., into fiction. What it was that allowed her to feel such a strong sense of vocation when everything in her environment militated against such a self-image is still a mystery. In her autobiography and in autobiographical reminiscences, she describes various strands in her personal history that constituted, for her, her education. The apparently contradictory self-images of Fannie Hurst as naive, self-created artist sprung from nowhere and as a sophisticated inheritor and practitioner of a literary tradition results from contradictions in her own life. As an American educated in the tradition of being heir to all the best in western cultural history, her access to this past was undisputed. However, as a second generation American-born Jewish-German woman, she had no formal education in a literary tradition that was really hers. The duality of her hyphenated identity legitimatizes the duality of her self-image. She was instructed by a combination of domestic and academic experiences, by intellectually rich contacts outside the classroom, by endless reading on her own, and by a rigorous course of study at Washington University in St. Louis. Besides alluding by name to specific books she read, she talks about her encounters with those books and with important teachers and mentors in the way that heroes of bildungsroman traditionally recount their encounters with bears, bullies, and sexually willing women. |
| Notes | Photocopy |
| Call Number | MKI P94-37 |
| MKI Terms | Women authors/ Jews, German/ German Americans |