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The Reinvention of Identity in Jeffrey Eugenides’s MiddlesexDOI: 10.4000/ejas.9036 Keywords: multiculturalism , identity , integration , Ethnicity , Greek-American literature , Hermaphroditus , gender , Bildungsroman , multigenerational , rooted cosmopolitan , transsexual , public ethnic , symbolic ethnic , continuity-discontinuity , immigrant novel , ethnic novel , assimilation , politics of descent , Hansen’s law , second generation , third generation. Abstract: In his second novel, Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides is deep in the Greeks. If Melville in Moby Dick sets up an anthology of whaling, Eugenides builds his collection of Greekness. It may be because the Greeks found a mythical way out of the contradictions and the ambiguities that characterize the fragmented human being in search of unity through Hermaphroditus, the figure of an indivisible duality, quite appropriate to express the diverse reality of American unity. The Pulitzer-prized writer re...
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