The Jew's Daughter, her advocates and her relatives

If you felt frustrated about not being able to find the "meaning" or "story" in Twelve Blue, I am guessing that The Jew's Daughter is not a "good read" for you.

As a way to think about how to "read" TJD, you might take a look at Lori Emerson's "My Digital Dickinson" in Vol 17.2 of The Emily Dickinson Journal (available through Project Muse on the Kean Library databases). Emerson suggests that digital reading strategies (such as those demanded by TJD) are pervasive and that they are changing the way we read texts in general.

Or you might consider TJD's ideology and focus are descendants of movements from both print (the Nouveau Roman) and film (French New Wave or Le Nouvelle Vague).

In the Nouveau Roman, writers such as Claude Simon, Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet more or less ditched traditional narrative lines and characters and devoted themselves to creating works that explore context, effects of time and space, and the form of the "novel" itself. (For example, see Michael Delahoyde's discussion of Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy.

Within film, the French New wave movement also moved away from standard story forms. According to Craig Phillips discussion of New Wave on Green Cine, the form favored:
"jump cuts: a non-naturalistic edit, usually a section of a continuous shot that is removed unexpectedly, illogically; shooting on location; natural lighting; improvised dialogue and plotting; direct sound recording; long takes" and other representational innovations that created a different "reality" that what was being set forward by Hollywood. These new film-making techniques placed new demands on viewers and were the impetus for new interpretive conventions = conventions for going with the flow and making the kind of local, particular interpretations that fit with postmodern texts and readings.

You might also take a look at screen 402 - for a summary of events. You might also mess around with "playing" the text - as opposed to reading it. It goes way too fast (and I don't know about your computer but mine things that is a lot to process all at one time) but for me it gave me a quick overview of the "shape" of the text.

Confession: Even on this second read - I come away with images and ideas - but I have a really hard time remembering the text(words) that engendered those ideas. And taking notes feels like it is the wrong way to track a text that "flows". . . so let me know what you are coming up with.