Cynthia Ozick: Orthodoxy and Irreverence. A Critical Study

The purpose of this study is to offer a sample of Cynthia Ozick’s fiction as representative of both contemporary American literature and Jewish culture. Her work, moreover, is used to exemplify some of the major shifts in Translation Studies, showing how the degree of her popularity in Italy depends on a slow dynamic, aimed at filling cultural gaps and/or at mapping emerging cultural and religious geographies. Ozick’s reception in Italian, in fact, raises significant linguistic and cultural issues including assimilation and marginality, the clash between the periphery and the center, and the use of translation as the process of canonization of a foreign writer who is also the representative of a “weak” literature, in the sense given by Itamar Even-Zohar in his Polysystem Theory.