Who Do You Think You Are? Storytelling, Performance, and Outrageous Lies in Emily Prager’s Eve’s Tattoo

Year 2000, Issue: 11, 3 - 13, 01.04.2000

Heidi S. Macpherson

Abstract

Emily Prager’s novel Eve’s Tattoo works within and against a gendered discourse of historical narratives, relying on oral tales and contemporary performance in order to revitalize a composite concentration camp victim whose fate is traced through a variety of frames. Ironic and postmodern, it acts as an important American Studies text for its interventions into historical frameworks and its use of cultural studies motifs, its manipulation of subjectivity and identity, and its focus on performance and appropriation. The novel relies on an odd sense of nostalgia for the past—in preference, almost, to a complicated present in the archetypal American city, New York—even as it limns the fate of “unusual” victims under Nazi Germany.

Keywords

Emily Prager, Storytelling, Performance

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