Queering the Jewish exile : bildungsroman, proust, and temporality in André Aciman’s Call me by your name

Abstract

This dissertation explores the queer representations of the exiled Jew in André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name. Although the film adaptation of the novel has been enthusiastically embraced, I contend that it has suppressed the Jew and reduced it to a mere story of summer romance between two young men. In an attempt to “bring back the Jew”, this dissertation studies the intricate relationships between the queer subject and the exiled Jew. It begins with the novel’s challenge to the Bildungsroman model of becoming by subverting the child/adult binary and examines the notion of pedophilia through a queer lens. It then investigates the novel’s linguistic destabilization of the many social categories, including friends, family, and lovers. Informed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990), it also contextualizes and analyzes the dynamics of the Jewish and queer closets in the novel. It looks at the queer space within which silence and ambiguous language create intimacy not despite, but rather because of, heterosexual oppression. Finally, I argue that exilic time and queer time exist outside the logic of modernist temporality by borrowing from José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of queer futurity and scrutinizing Aciman’s adoption of Proustian temporizing and timeless aesthetics.