Augie March Research Articles

دراسة الجوانب التاريخية والسيرة الذاتية لشاول بيلو مغامرات أوجي مارش ومحمد شكري للخبز وحده : قراءة تاريخية جديدة

تناول المقالة الحالية دراسة مغامرات أوجي مارش لمؤلفه ساول بيلو ، وكتاب محمد شكري للخبز وحده من منظور التاريخ الجديد ، لا سيما كما تصورها ستيفن جرينبلات. من وجهة نظر جرينبلات ، فإن التاريخية الجديدة هي نهج للأدب يربط الأخير بالثقافة والخلفيات التاريخية. تتضمن هذه النظرية تحليلًا شاملاً للأعمال الأدبية ؛ السماح بعدسة واسعة يمكن للقراء من خلالها استكشاف معاني مختلفة. تستكشف هذه الدراسة مغامرات أوجي مارش ساول بيلو ، و محمد شكري للخبز وحده العثور على عناصر السيرة الذاتية المدرجة في هذه الروايات ؛ فضلا عن الخلفيات التاريخية الملهمة لكتابة هذه الروايات. عند قراءتها ضمن هذا النطاق ، يتم تقديم الروايات كأوعية ديناميكية تحمل الكثير من مصائب وألم الكتّاب ، وهم يحاولون إيصالها. بالإضافة إلى ذلك ، تطبق الدراسة مفهوم جرينبلات عن "الطاقة الاجتماعية" على الروايات من أجل تحليل أفعال الشخصيات في الروايتين. يكشف المقال كيف تحاول هذه الشخصيات تدمير واقعهم من خلال الاستجابة بتحد لضغط هذه الطاقة. تظهر نتائج الدراسة أن مفهوم جرينبلات عن "الطاقة الاجتماعية" يفسر الحالة المزاجية للروايات التي تخاطب حاجة القراء المستمرة إلى التحرر من أي فرض. في كلتا الروايتين ، يقدم أبطال الرواية للقراء نماذج من الحياة المستقلة ليتبناها القراء أنفسهم. وبذلك ، قام بيلو وشكري بتسليم رسائل الحرية المضمنة لقرائهما. علاوة على ذلك ، تناقش الدراسة الحالية مفاهيم جرينبلات عن "التخريب والاحتواء" فيما يتعلق بروايات بيلو وشكري. مع تطبيق هذه المفاهيم من قبل جرينبلات على الروايات ، تظهر الدراسة أنه يمكن قراءة هذه الروايات على أنها تعبيرات عن عدم توافق الكتاب مع معايير مجتمعاتهم.

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF PICARESQUE FICTION IN THE NOVEL THE ADVENTURE OF AUGIE MARCH (SAUL BELLOW)

Picaresque novel is one of the most pre-existing genres of novels in European literature as a provocation against the typical Chivalric romance. The Adventure of Augie March by Saul Bellow is a good example of the return of this genre in the twentieth century. The novel tells the story of the varied and often aimless pursuits of a young man, Augie, growing up in the decades before and during the Great Depression, the great economic cataclysm of the 1930s. Using poetic and sociological research methods, this article focuses on clarifying the characteristics of the picaresque novel in The Adventure of Augie March. This style writing manifested in the plot of the journey, depicting a chaotic world where the main character Augie March - a typical pícaro character in modern life - become a solitary individual, an anti-hero man always seeking out the reason for his existence. The first-person autobiographical narrative and the satire are also classic principles of picaresque genre that can be found in this novel. It can be sail, The Adventure of Augie March is a rebirth of the picaresque novel genre in Saul Bellow's own way to convey contemporary problems. Thereby the readers realize the modern anti-hero is not similar to the heroic figure of the romance, for his world is chaos and he struggles to merely survive, In a world that ignores the rules of chivalry, the only workable rule is every man for himself.

Neopicaresque, Jewish Humor and Denunciation of Cosmopolitanism in Franz Kafka’s Amerika and Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March

The neopicaresque novel is a nascent genre that was invigorated in the aftermath of World Wars I and II in Britain and the United States. Contemporary studies of neopicaresque depict the image of the picaro as the “alienated”, “the outcast” and the “rebellious” character. This study is an attempt to redefine the Jewish neopicaresque novel and proposes that Jewish humor and denunciation of cosmopolitanism are indispensable aspects that need further investigation. It endeavors through these two aspects to comment on the Jewish exilic experience in cosmopolitan America. Further, the study proposes that Jewish humor and denunciation of cosmopolitism unearth the inability of the ghetto-minded Jewish immigrant to fathom the traumatic and rapid social and political vicissitudes that lead him to escape this chaotic life. These propositions are expounded through a close reading of Franz Kafka’s Amerika: The Man who Disappeared (1914) and Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (1953). These Jewish travel narratives are discussed as Jewish neopicaresque novels that demonstrate the exodus of Eastern Jewish immigrants to America in the aftermath of WWI and II. The study draws on Freudian psychoanalytic theory of Jewish “self-critical “and “self-deprecating” humor. Considerations of the cultural dilemma of the Jewish ghetto immigrant and his negative depictions as “the wanderer Jew” and the “displaced-person” are addressed from the critical perspective of contemporary cosmopolitan discourses of Cathy S. Gelbin and Sander L. Gilman and Ulrich Beck. Keywords: Jewish neopicaresque novel, Jewish humor, cosmopolitanism, Kafka’s Amerika, Soul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March.

The Pathological Family System in Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March

We present a new reading of Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March (1953) by viewing the novel through the lens of family systems psychotherapy. Relying on the key ideas of family systems theorists Murray Bowen and Salvador Minuchin, we explore how the pathological March family system shapes Augie and his older brother Simon. Although the personalities of the two brothers are dissimilar, both are in different ways narcissistic and profoundly troubled. In search of someone or something that will enable them to overcome their malaise, Augie and Simon reveal what Bowen calls low levels of "differentiation of self," which results in their being controlled by their emotions instead of relying on intellectual processes and firmly held convictions in responding to conflict.

The Pathological Family System in Saul Bellow's <em>The Adventures of Augie March</em>

The Pathological Family System in Saul Bellow's <em>The Adventures of Augie March</em>

The Shell by Paul Starkey

conflicts. I feel less qualified to judge the attraction of the detailed historical events for those who did not live through those heady midcentury years. The most interesting parts of the lives, for me, were the apprenticeships and fictions spun out of the three writer embodiments. Much of Auster seems committed to those accounts. While some already hail this novel as a masterpiece, one is reminded that length alone does not an epic make. The book is certainly a saga, reminiscent of Richard Powers’s wonderful The Time of Our Singing or Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March or even the late Victorian novels of families in a time of change. Whatever its posterity, 4 3 2 1 is certainly an impressive achievement. W. M. Hagen Oklahoma Baptist University Mustafa Khalifa. The Shell. Trans. Paul Starkey. Northampton, Massachusetts. Interlink Books. 2017. 252 pages. Mustafa Khalifa’s debut effort, The Shell, is difficult to stomach. It is also undoubtedly necessary. A fictional account that emerges from one of the most relevant and contemporary scenarios, the text anchors the reader with its examination of depravity yet engages and compels its audience to read on as the work illuminates treasured, albeit painful, moments of perseverance and triumph. Musa, a film student studying in France, is immediately apprehended after landing in his home of Syria. He is subsequently withheld, tortured, and then transferred to the harshest prison under Bashar alAssad ’s regime. Repeatedly stripped of his humanity and pressed against death’s precipice , Musa survives with dark humor and the solace brought with a shared struggle. The narrator quickly develops a mode of memorization derived from the practice of his fellow inmates, cognitively noting his struggle and biding time until he can record his journal physically. Unfortunately , Musa is forced to endure for over a decade, a duration Khalifa echoes with his harrowing prose. Khalifa’s illustration of torment is striking and compelling. In some instances, the writer’s imagery is akin to Dante Alighieri’s Inferno as each pursuant episode sets a new precedent of human horror. To combat this, Khalifa maintains a realism and optimism through the lives of the inmates, often providing a very real face to an otherwise nameless and imminent cadaver. As the novel progresses , Musa’s predicament slowly morphs from scenes of helplessness, such as when he is forced to swallow the mucus of a prison guard, to challenges the narrator is prepared to overcome. That is not to suggest the content of the novel’s latter half grows desensitized , but it is evident of Musa’s resolve. Though Khalifa’s attention to detail is exceptional, the unanticipated comedy of his discourse is often its most compelling suit. From the brief exchange Musa shares with a fellow prisoner after the latter party mistakes his toe for the lips of his wife, to the tale of a particularly aggressive guard’s acquisition of a new nickname at his own expense, each instance provides a needed reprieve, proving the most troubling of scenarios cannot hinder the spectrum of emotion . Khalifa’s masterful control of pace keeps these asides from trivializing the meat of his work, instead building toward an empathetic whole. The Shell’s faults are few, though some of the text’s key characters can feel minimalized before there is an opportunity to become too attached. However, this periodic feeling does seem in line with the grizzly and fatalistic nature of The Shell’s primary setting. Despite this, the novel perseveres, conveying strength in humanity throughout its darkest depths. Daniel Bokemper Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Christos Chrissopoulos The Parthenon Bomber Trans. John Cullen Other Press Greek author Christos Chrissopoulos plunges us immediately into a dystopian reality where the most beloved and revered Greek historical marker has been bombed. Told through various accounts, The Parthenon Bomber brings the issue of cultural attachment to the forefront of the reader’s mind to beg this question: If the Parthenon is destroyed, is Greece’s culture destroyed with it? Zeina Hashem Beck Louder Than Hearts Bauhan Lebanese poet Zeina Hashem Beck delivers a tour de force in her second collection, inviting the reader to join her in the emotional interstices between the...

“Recover the world that is buried under the debris of false description”: The Influence of Romantic Poetry on Saul Bellow’s Dean’s December

The defense of the human being’s individuality is a major issue that Saul Bellow (1915-2005) addresses throughout his literary career. Worried by the pernicious effects that modern civilization exerts over the individual’s inner self, in Humboldt’s Gift (1975) and in The Dean’s December (1982) Bellow shows that the reconstruction of the inner self can only be accomplished through the imaginative mind or, in a romantic phrase, through the human being’s poetic genius.” This essay explorea the significance of this issue in The Dean’s December in light of William Blake’s “Then She Bore Pale Desire,” “London,” and “The Chimney Sweeper”; W. B. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Long-Legged Fly”; and P. B. Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” and “England in 1819.” In a romantic manner, Bellow’s Albert Corde escapes from the city — a symbol of Blake’s “fallen world,” Yeats’s “dying generations” and “underclass,” and tyranny as expressed in Shelley’s sonnet — and, much like Bellow’s Augie March, Eugene Henderson, and Moses Herzog, ends up going to nature, epitomized by the Mt. Palomar observatory, in order to find his long-awaited peace of mind.

The Place You Come from Stamps You: Saul Bellow’s Midwest

The Place You Come from Stamps You:Saul Bellow’s Midwest Andrew Seal A review of Zachary Leader’s The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015) and Saul Bellow’s There is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction, edited by Benjamin Taylor ( New York: Viking Press, 2015). “I am an American, Chicago-born,” wrote Saul Bellow, in the opening line of The Adventures of Augie March. But while that simple statement was true of Augie, it was not true of Bellow, who was born in Québec, in Montréal. Bellow did not even become a naturalized American citizen until 1943, only ten years before Augie March was published. Bellow is therefore, among other things, the most decorated first-generation author in U.S. literary history—a distinction not often mentioned in his list of accolades. He is also perhaps the best-known undocumented immigrant writer in U.S. history (his family crossed the Canadian border on the Fourth of July, 1924, smuggled over by bootleggers). Yet in the most important senses, Augie bore no false witness on Bellow’s behalf: if Saul was not a Chicagoan by nativity, he had what some Jews would call a Chicagoan neshama, a Chicagoan soul or spirit. Bellow brought a renewed wave of literary respect to the city of Chicago; he spoke often of it in public talks and affirmed how much it had shaped him. Although his fiction was set in many places over the years, Chicago was obviously an anchor, his axis mundi, a place to renew his literary gifts. The Chicago that people all over the world knew was the Chicago of the Bellovian imagination. But if Bellow was unimpeachably a Chicagoan, was he also a midwesterner? In Zachary Leader’s first volume of a two-volume biography of Bellow, we are given Bellow affirming his affinity for the Midwest on a number of occasions, for instance in an interview with a University of Minnesota student newspaper: “I think the place you come from stamps you,” he remarked, [End Page 207] and added, “I consider myself a mid-westerner.” But generally Bellow discussed his midwesternness in connection with his love for the City of Broad Shoulders, as when he wrote to Ralph Ellison enthusiastically about his time spent in Minneapolis: “I find the Midwest agrees with me. Here I recognize things. And I’m near Chicago.” A Chicagoan first, then, and a midwesterner second—perhaps not an uncommon form of nested identities, local and then regional. But even though a good chunk of the biography is set in Minneapolis and in Madison, Wisconsin, Leader’s biography of Bellow barely probes the question of region or regionalism in Bellow’s work or life, though that is not exactly a knock on his work, as most Chicago-centric lives and books seem to let the question of regionalism subside rather quickly, that jump from city to region left undefined. Those books which have been written about this question generally take a roundabout way of answering it. When that relationship is faced squarely—in a novel or a monograph or a biography—it is generally from the viewpoint of a migrant to the Windy City—which Bellow was, although not from the midwestern hinterland. Midwesterners become Chicagoans; Chicagoans, perhaps, are midwesterners by a kind of courtesy appointment. To read the two books under review—Leader’s biography and Benjamin Taylor’s edited collection of Bellow’s nonfiction—simply to settle the case of Saul Bellow’s midwesternness, however, would be a poor use of their vast scope. Leader’s biography in particular is an extraordinary work of accumulation and organization—it is really one of the most complete pictures of intellectual life in the United States of midcentury that we have. It more than earns the title “authoritative,” although biographies which are considered authoritative are also often said to have “the last word” on their subject, and while the work is certainly the former, it does not really attempt to have the latter. It is comprehensive—enormously impressive in its breadth of context and in its diligence of detail—but it...

The Dream of the Great American Novel by Lawrence Buell

Reviewed by: The Dream of the Great American Novel by Lawrence Buell Christian Howard Lawrence Buell. The Dream of the Great American Novel. Cambridge: Belknap, 2014. xii + 567 pp. Despite its near extinction within scholarly circles, the term “Great American Novel” achieves a revitalized dynamism through Lawrence Buell’s exploration of the sociopolitical and cultural layers that have amassed around it. Indeed, The Dream of the Great American Novel develops both a history and argument around the changing concept of the great American novel since its inception following the Civil War, and Buell utilizes this term as “a platform for exploring specific pathways that have helped certain novels come to the fore as reference points for imagining U.S. national identity” (1). In so doing, Buell foregrounds the problematic concept of national identity, and he argues for an understanding of US literary history “as a polylogue of often dissonant voices and perspectives” (14) even as he cautions against “the temptation to overgeneralize on the basis of any one ethnic or regional subculture” (15). The result is a complex yet well-organized argument for the place of literature in the evolution of the national imaginary, an argument that is as relevant to historical and cultural studies as it is to literary criticism. Buell divides the concept of the great American novel into four primary “scripts,” each of which corresponds to a different section of his book. The first of these scripts, “Made Classic by Retelling,” examines how a novel achieves this canonical status through a “continuous generativity” that acts as “provocation and reference point” (73). Using Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter as exemplar of this script, Buell analyzes how a novel that achieves early international acclaim can be reified into a national icon through its proliferation across various media (including plays, operas, musicals, films, and dance creations) as well as through literary permutations and retellings (such as William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, John Updike’s Roger’s Version, and Bharati Mukherjee’s The Holder of the World). Even as the first script examines how a national culture can enshrine a literary work, the second script, “Aspiration in America,” details how literary works reinscribe the national imaginary. To show this reinscription, Buell explores the great American novel as the US mythic narrative, that is, the formation of the individual and the rise from humble origins, or the “up-from” narrative (108). Importantly, Buell confronts the gender and ethnic gaps within US fictions of development, showing that, even as such gaps were less egregious in the US than in the Anglo European male-centric bildungsroman, so was the relative salience of female bildungsroman in premodern American literature connected to the stress on self-fashioning in a pre-Franklin and Emersonian sense. In other words, Buell argues that [End Page 545] Benjamin Franklin and Ralph Waldo Emerson increasingly influenced the conception of the up-from narrative in such a way as to give it a more masculine spin in the twentieth century than in earlier American fiction; earlier US fiction showcases more female independence through such works as Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, and Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country Doctor. In the mid-twentieth century, the up-from narrative took a new “ethnic turn” that has “tended … to bring issues of social justice more robustly to the fore than in earlier novels of aspiration” (214). Such ethnic up-from narratives include Richard Wright’s Native Son, Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, and even more recent works such as Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker and Ha Jin’s A Free Life. “Romancing the Divides,” Buell’s third script, explores the cultural divides concerned with region, race, and ethnicity in the national imaginary. This script is subdivided into four types, each of which exemplifies a historical and sociopolitical movement. These four types are all likewise represented by a great American novel candidate: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin negotiates the North-South divide in a polemical social critique that “enlist[s] … art in the service of activism” (226) even as Mark Twain’s...

A Fresh-Start Doctrine: The Marshall Plan, The Adventures of Augie March , and the Bildungsroman after Nationalism

Reading The Adventures of Augie March in the context of its composition in Marshall Plan–era Paris, this essay argues that Saul Bellow’s novel operates analogously to American public diplomacy of the early Cold War, especially in its reinvention of the Bildungsroman genre. Architects of the Marshall Plan argued against national consolidation and for the international circulation of discourse and capital, a project contrary to established European ideas of national culture and Bildung . Similarly, Augie March should be read as a Bildungsroman employing picaresque methods to undermine the genre’s traditional concerns. By sending its protagonist on a long series of abortive apprenticeships in European programs of cultivation, the novel posits a notion of American Bildung as not just one among many paths of development, but rather a pragmatic resistance to them all—exactly the notion promoted by the official rhetoric of the “Pax Americana.”

Bruegel and John Berryman

Pieter Bruegel's art, with its clear images, precise details, sly wit, sharp satire, fantastic, grotesque, horrific, and mysterious elements, and his strange yet familiar world-view, has strongly appealed to modern literary sensibility. Charles Baudelaire's L'Aveugles has been influenced by The Blind Leading Blind, W. H. Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts by The Fall of Icarus, Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March by The Misanthrope, William Carlos Williams' Pictures from Brueghel by several paintings, Sylvia Plath's Two Views of a Cadaver Room by The Triumph of Death. John was attracted to Bruegel's Hunters in Snow, which inspired his poem Winter Landscape. The few critics who have discussed this poem have focused on its meaning. Joel Conarroe dismisses as a failure. Stephen Matterson discusses influence of Keats and Yeats. Arthur Evans and Catherine Evans argue that Berryman strives to rival peculiarly painterly exposition of an idea through a parallel reconstruction by means of verse. These critics also try to reach definite conclusions as to differences and affinities existing between arts. In his essay Answer to a Question, refutes Evans' article by declaring that readers seem to take [the poem] for either a verbal equivalent to picture or ... an interpretation of Both views I would call wrong, though first is that adopted in a comparative essay ... by two aestheticians at University of Notre Dame. J. M. Linebarger merely quotes Berryman's description of poem in Answer to a Question: it is a war-poem ... hunters are loosed while peaceful nations plunge again into war.... The picture has merely provided necessary material, from a tranquil world, for what is necessary to be said--but which poet refuses to say--about a violent world. But as D. H. Lawrence warned: Never trust teller, trust tale. A careful analysis of painting reveals Berryman's strategy and illuminates elusive themes of poem. The popular Hunters in Snow (1565, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) (1) is a massive, minutely detailed, four-by-five-foot painting, set in January, one of five surviving panels of original series of twelve that represented months of year. The three hunters, seen from behind, descend a steep hill with their pack of thirteen scrawny hounds, which form silhouettes against snowy backdrop. The hunters are returning safely to village, but have not captured a huge stag, portrayed on inn sign, or a fat pig, about to be killed on left. Instead, they bring only meager bounty from desolate landscape: a long, thin hare that hangs down back of one hunter. As Williams writes in his descriptive poem, the cold / inn yard is / deserted but for a huge bonfire / that flares wind-driven tended by / women who cluster / about it. Beneath unhooked and dangling inn sign, a family prepares a fire to singe and smoke their slaughtered pig. A vast frosty landscape, broken by bare-branched trees with standing rooks, unfolds below them. Despite cold, picture is full of activity. One woman drags a friend in a sled while another carries faggots across a sturdy stone bridge. In middle distance, a horse pulls a heavily laden cart toward a church and steeple, and fire shoots out of chimney of a distant, snow-covered house. There are four receding planes from artist's high vantage point: hunters in snow; two frozen grey-green ponds that support energetic skaters, hockey players and ice fishermen; village clustering around church in middle distance; and four snow-capped, towering peaks, incongruous in Flanders, a recollection from Bruegel's transalpine journey to Italy. These mountains shoot up fantastically in background and provide a striking contrast to flat landscape that is accentuated by icy ponds. The tranquility, harmony, and sheer beauty of this deeply satisfying painting testify to Bruegel's perennial appeal. …

Muddled Origins in Picaresque Literature: The Foreshadowing of Chaotic Lives

Picaresque literature is known for several specific traits: 1) firstperson narration and the protagonist’s struggle for survival and a better life; 2) the chaotic childhood, outsiderdom, and low social class of the main character; 3) frequent role changes or disguises; and 4) an inconclusive ending. This article traces the muddled genealogy and subsequent chaotic lives of four picaros : Lazarillo de Tormes, Quevedo’s Pablos de Segovia, Bellow’s Augie March, and Defoe’s Moll Flanders.

A Life of Learning: Wandering among Fields

number of years ago, having arrived at the University of Houston to give a lecture, I was joined for lunch by a visiting scholar from France. Someone at the table asked him what his field was. With a haughtiness that I associate, perhaps unfairly, with a certain kind of French intellectual, he answered, dismissively, A peasant has a I do not have a field. I have reflected on that remark from time to time ever since, and though I don't in the least identify with the tone in which it was delivered, I have come to the conclusion that I, too, don't have a field, or that at any rate, I have chosen too many rows to hoe, going in different directions, to constitute a neatly demarcated My intellectual history has certainly been a story of wandering out of fields. I decided to do graduate work at Harvard in comparative literature rather than in a single national literature because I didn't want to be limited to a set of texts in just one national tradition. My dissertation on the picaresque novel began with the first instance of the genre, the sixteenth-century Spanish Lazarillo de Tormes and concluded with Thomas Mann's Felix Krull and Saul Bellow's Augie March, but when I started my first teaching job in the English department at Columbia, because the central chapters of my dissertation had focused on eighteenth-century novels (one in French as well as works in English), I was duly classified as an eighteenth-century specialist and found myself teaching courses that included Addison, Swift, and Pope as well as Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, and Sterne. These were teaching occasions that gave me great pleasure, and in keeping with the logic of my appointment, I began work on a critical study of Fielding, which I completed around the time I was moving on from Columbia. I suppose the book was not altogether a straight-up eighteenth-century project since I sweepingly called it Fielding and the Nature of the Novel, and under that rubric, I was able to sneak into the final chapter some discussion of Nabokov, an enthusiasm I had developed in those years and that I have maintained until now. There was another way in which I did not sit still among the English Augustan writers during my four-year teaching stint at Columbia. By my late teens, I had acquired a very good literary command of Hebrew in all its major historical phases, with a special interest in the modern period. Modern Hebrew had been one of my minor literatures at Harvard, though everything I knew about it was self-taught because there was no one on the Harvard faculty with any competence in that area. While I was teaching and writing on the eighteenth-century English novelists, I had also begun to publish articles on modern Hebrew literature--and, at the same time, on Jewish-American writers, who at that moment, in the 1960s, were at their apogee. After the fact, I suspect that my senior colleagues in the Columbia English department looked askance at this extra-curricular activity because it did not address the field for which they thought they had hired me. But this is precisely what brought me to the position at Berkeley where I have thrived for four and a half decades. Comparative literature had just been granted departmental status under the direction of Alain Renoir, a wildly energetic and at times zany man with a strong intellectual vision, who had the idea of building a department out of joint appointments with other departments that would authoritatively span the literary globe. He wanted someone in modern Hebrew literature, and at the time I may have been the only visible person capable of putting together two literate English sentences on the subject (the situation now is much improved). He made me an offer I couldn't refuse--a tenured position with a handsome increase in salary, and so I accepted sight unseen and traveled west of Chicago for the first time in my life to a place where new professional horizons were to open for me. …

The Einhorn Effect in Saul Bellow's ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH

Saul Bellow's Adventures of Augie March (1953) is a picaresque novel about a rambling, handsome young man for whom doors magically open throughout his almost endless peregrinations. Traveling from ...

Foreign Bodies:

Foreign Bodies:

Saul Bellow's Enigmatic Love

On a summer afternoon approached the old farmhouse where was scheduled to meet my teacher, Saul Bellow. He sat on the porch in a rocking chair with a book in his lap. was nervous about how he would respond to my stories. What else could do but trip on the wooden stairs? He looked up and grinned in sympathy. He was fresh from a great novel's success. The Adventures of Augie March had just won the 1954 Pulitzer Prize, and wondered why he would bother coming here to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont to teach. He was handsome as a movie star. Large brown eyes, wide mouth, head thrown back to enjoy his own laughter an image familiar now from book photos. But then! He gleamed. The presence of Saul, as we students democratically called him, added a giddiness to the already over-excited atmosphere, the boundless aspirations of writing students. Those in the know that summer said Saul was recently divorced. So was I, as it happened, but was not gleaming. had come to Bread Loaf in the hope that someone would lift my disillusion by telling me that my writing, at least, was good. Saul opened my folder, studied it again for a second. There was no other chair. sat on the porch steps to wait for his comments. At dinner the night before, had had to pass him to get to my place. He shoved his chair from the table and said, I seem to recognize you. was pleased but blank. Must be racial memory, then, he said, amused. Who could tell if he was parodying himself, me, the remark, or all three? His books were full of comedy. At the same time, every moment was weighted with significance. The hero's glance took in the random world and transformed it into one where light, falling on a house, a wall, a hillside, spoke of cosmic matters. Material things and events could be more than one knew, Bellow's novels told us, and his heroes all searched for that more. He had a mystic's awareness of hidden matters, and a skeptic's humor about his avidness for them. Saul looked up from my folder. Something's wrong with your stories, he said. He recognized whose work had been reading, and told me to lay off Henry James.

Encyclopedia of Jewish-American literature

Jewish-American writing holds an essential place in America's literary tradition, and Jewish-American writers have flourished in many genres, including fiction, drama, poetry, and more. Encyclopedia of Jewish-American Literature examines hundreds of these authors and works, focusing on those that are part of the high school and college curriculum, as well as the historically significant and contemporary.The coverage includes: The Adventures of Augie March; Dorothy Parker; Chaim Potok; Ragtime; Philip Roth; Isaac Bashevis Singer; Susan Sontag; Elie Wiesel; and more.

“The Death of the Novel” And Its Afterlives: Toward a History of the “Big, Ambitious Novel”

The category of the “big, ambitious novel,” circumscribing works by authors such as Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, and William Vollmann, has come to constitute one of the major forms through which postwar U.S. fiction is sorted and evaluated. A history of this form must not start in the 1970s, however, nor with distant forerunners such as James Joyce's Ulysses, but from 1945. After the Second World War, critics and novelists negotiated the sort of literature that would count as great after the end of high modernism, in service of a new humanism. The novels Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow succeeded stylistically and thematically where Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and William Faulkner's A Fable did not. They offered a new vitality to overcome critics' discourse of the “death of the novel” and probed new forms of human peculiarity that managed fears of the decline of the will of “man.” This long history helps to extend our understanding of the origins and significance of interminable and system-centered fictions denounced by critics such as James Wood as mere “hysterical realism.” It reorients contemporary criticism of these books to the shared, credible subjects of enforced liveliness and endlessness in narration, and a longer-term questioning of the human in a wider range of American fictions. It also shows how the novelists' apparent betrayal of humanist concerns actually emerged from earlier stages of interaction between novelists and mistrustful critics.

The Jewish Writer in America

The Jewish Writer in America Eugene Goodheart (bio) The year 1953 was an extraordinary one in the history of American literature. With the publication of Saul Bellow's third novel, The Adventures of Augie March, American-Jewish writing entered and took center stage. His first two novels, Dangling Man and The Victim, had been critical successes; but Augie March was at once a critical success and a best seller, winning the National Book Award. "I am an American, Chicago born," the hero declares in the opening sentence of the novel. That he is Jewish is not mentioned, though there is no doubting Augie's identity as the novel unfolds. The focus on his Americanness and his birth in Chicago dispels any expectation that this may be another novel of a Jewish hero enclosed in a claustral shtetl psychology. The echo of Mark Twain's great novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the title suggests that Bellow sees himself in the great tradition of American writing. In considering William Einhorn, wealthy and crippled but politically powerful, one of Bellow's larger-than-life characters, Augie enters him on his "eminent list" of world-historical figures. He imagines one of Einhorn's disciples having to make an important decision and asking himself: "What would Caesar suffer in this case? What would Machiavelli advise or Ulysses do? What would Einhorn think?" Against the philistine democratic view that the human "race no longer has in any important degree the traits we honor in these fabulous names," Augie insists on his "right to praise Einhorn," an epic character of his time. At the end of the chapter devoted to this "superior man," Augie finds himself "not in the center of the labyrinth but on a wide boulevard." There are, of course, no boulevards in the shtetl. Isn't this the achievement of Bellow—to take the Jew off the side streets and put him on the boulevard of the imagination? The titles of his first two novels are a measure of the imaginative leap he made in writing Augie March. No longer dangling man or victim, Augie in his swagger displays a confidence in his place in American life that verges on bravado. "[I] go at things as [End Page 93] I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way, first to knock, first admitted, sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent." Even anti-Semitism fails to faze the youthful Augie, whose take on it is peculiarly American: "And sometimes we were chased, stoned, bitten, and beat up for Christ-killers. . . . But I never had any special grief from it, or brooded, being by and large too larky and boisterous to take it to heart, and looked at it as needing no more special explanation than the stone-and-bat wars of the street gangs or the swarming on a full evening of parish punks to rip up fences, screech and bawl at girls, and beat up strangers." How did Bellow manage the leap? Well, there is the matter of genius and temperament that goes beyond explanation. But genius and temperament alone do not guarantee recognition, let alone success. There is also the matter of the historical moment, the post–World War ii period. It is one of the most extraordinary facts of our democracy that the military may be in the social sense its most democratic institution. It is the place where men and women of different religious, racial, and ethnic backgrounds mix in a condition of equality, sometimes under fire, despite the hierarchical structure of the military. Moreover World War ii was a war against the most pernicious racism and anti-Semitism in history. During the postwar period America became increasingly hospitable, though not without resistance, to the claims of its minorities to full cultural, social, and political enfranchisement. The war served as a rite of passage for Jews as well as for other ethnic groups. Bellow was a pioneer in literature; Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and others would soon follow. According to an anthology of American-Jewish writing published in the 1960s, the "breakthrough" meant not that "the Jew has caught up with America...

IN MEMORIAM: KENNETH CMIEL

“I am an American, Chicago born,” runs the first line of a famous novel by Saul Bellow. Anyone who knew the historian Kenneth Cmiel, who died on 4 February 2006, will recognize how this blunt affirmation of Chicago identity could serve Ken as well as it served Augie March. Not that Ken played the identity game pretentiously. A capacity to live a particular persona without being captured by it was one of his countless endearing traits. But being a Chicago person, by birth and by doctorate and by a style that never left him in Iowa City or Berkeley, meant a lot to Ken, and it gave a certain tone to his skeptical, yet sensitive, responses to the conceits and aspirations of his colleagues and friends.