Alfred Kazin's Vision in the American Romance Tradition
As a member of the second-generation New York Intellectuals, Alfred Kazin described himself as a "Walker," detached from the dominant forms of social criticism. Kazin highlighted the construction of personal faith and the American national spirit of romance, namely, the Romantic "vision" or "second nature." Being unable to identify with Jewish cultures and American Marxists' theoretical values, he turned to radical literature and relied on "American sensibility" as a key component of his literary imagination. Standing on the native grounds, Kazin participated in and witnessed the development and growth of American literary studies. Although having not properly defined the scope of "modern American literature," he revealed the "tragic" sense of American literary history and, as a result, transformed this literary history into a history of American romance spirit. When his sense of alienation from society was increasing, the occurrence of the Holocaust had further aggravated Kazin's spiritual crisis, which made his "American sensibility" a fusion of American and Jewish minds. In a post-modern context of political crisis, cultural nihilism and withering of American Religion, Kazin tried to restore the tradition of Emersonian self-reliance. In the process of writing about both the private and national "selfhood," Kazin created his own belief of "Jewish Romanticism."
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