Book Description
Let it Be Consumption!: Modern Jewish Writing and the Literary Capital of Tuberculosis investigates the relationship between literary production and the cultural experience of illness. Focusing attention on the history of modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature, this study examines how a diagnosis of tuberculosis mobilized literary and financial support on behalf of the ailing writer. At the same time, the disease itself became a subject of concern in the writer's creative oeuvre and literary self-fashioning. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour, I argue that the role played by disease in these traditions is best understood through the paradox of tubercular capital. The debilitating and incurable illness proved a generative context for these writers to develop their literary identities, augment their reputations and join together in a variety of overlapping and intersecting genealogies of tubercular writing.