摘要：In his second novel, Middlesex1, 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 revisits the myth in a novel way combining it with the aporias of ethnicity. Gender trouble in Middlesex could hardly veil the immigrant and ethnic experience in America that spans three generations of a Greek family in the twentieth century. The novel is about reinventing your identity on different levels, be that Greek to American, female to male, says the author who, digging up his Greek origins, makes an original contribution to the Greek-American novel.2
关键词：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.
