Ozick’s Idols

Abstract

An exploration of Ozick’s critique of Harold Bloom, in which she argues that his literary critical schemas amount to a form of idolatry, is developed into a wider account of the place of the risks of idol making and idol worship in her fictional and nonfictional writings. Ozick is seen to gradually move from a vision of the imagination as intrinsically idolatrous—hence the very notion of a Jewish writer is seen as contradictory—toward a moderated stance in which the risks of idolatrous imagining can be navigated, if never eliminated altogether.