Bernard Malamud Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

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  • Animal Studies, Apocalypticism, Eschatology and Apocalypticism, Apocalypticism In Literature

On the surface, Franz Kafka’s short story “A Report to an Academy” (1917) and Bernard Malamud‘s last finished novel, God’s Grace (1982), appear quite different. But they each boast a striking, similar feature: both contain verbal apes who... more

On the surface, Franz Kafka’s short story “A Report to an Academy” (1917) and Bernard Malamud‘s last finished novel, God’s Grace (1982), appear quite different. But they each boast a striking, similar feature: both contain verbal apes who serve to drive home a point about the Jewish condition...

• • by Yaelle Frohlich
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  • Franz Kafka, Jewish Literature, Jewish Identity, Bernard Malamud
• • by Gisella Stancanelli
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  • Joseph Roth, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, La vita è bella
• • by Noam Gil
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  • Jewish American Literature, Yiddish Literature, Theodor Adorno, Identity (Culture)

This monograph provides a chronological overview of the campus novel from the 1950s to the early 21st century. All of the six chapters compare two representative texts from each decade—one British and one American. The findings show that... more

This monograph provides a chronological overview of the campus novel from the 1950s to the early 21st century. All of the six chapters compare two representative texts from each decade—one British and one American. The findings show that the authors of American campus novels (e.g. Nabokov, Malamud, and DeLillo) are more diverse than their British counterparts (e.g. Amis, Bradbury, and Lodge). The monograph also addresses the coexistence of the comic and the satirical within the genre. The conclusion emphasizes that although Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, one of the most recent campus novels, can hardly be characterized as a comic novel, all of the texts analyzed in this volume are satirical in their effect, as they try to name and potentially reform various problematic aspects of academia.

• • by Petr Antene
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  • American Literature, British Literature, Intertextuality, Don DeLillo
• • by Ronald Walker
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  • Jewish American Literature, Short story (Literature), Bernard Malamud
• • by Cyrus R. K. Patell
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  • American Literature, Baseball, Baseball History & America, Ralph Waldo Emerson
• • by Ronald Walker
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  • Jewish American Literature, Short story (Literature), Bernard Malamud
• • by John Berge
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  • American History, Dystopian Literature, Fiction, J.G. Ballard

Many of the stories written by the Jewish American author Bernard Malamud take place in cities that make a lasting impression because of their significance in relation to the characters’ plights. His stories are like paintings in which... more

Many of the stories written by the Jewish American author Bernard Malamud take place in cities that make a lasting impression because of their significance in relation to the characters’ plights. His stories are like paintings in which every detail counts towards the final effect, and the reader is led to visualize every alley, every turn and step that the characters take in the city. The present paper will examine the meaning of the aesthetic of the cities in Malamud's fiction, choosing a series of short stories which on the one hand depict New York City, and on the other hand Italian cities such as Rome or Milan, as well as a paradise-like setting for contrast, in Lake Maggiore. In all of these cases, for the characters there is a hostile environment but also a glimmer of hope in the setting. Thus, in these stories, what appears promising may be disappointing, and what seems sombre may reveal light.

• • by Lluvia de Segovia de Kraker
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  • Jewish American Literature, Cities, Bernard Malamud
• • by Douglas Basford
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  • Elizabeth Bishop, Urban And Regional Planning, Translation, Bernard Malamud

A study of selected popular literature on Spinoza for the Blackwell Companion to Spinoza, ed. Y. Y. Melamed.

• • by Jack Stetter
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  • Philosophy, 17th Century & Early Modern Philosophy, Philosophy of Literature, Baruch Spinoza
• • by Eugene Arva
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  • Trauma Studies, Holocaust Studies, Literature and Trauma, Holocaust Literature

Negli ultimi anni della sua vita Bernard Malamud indicava spesso all'amico e collega Claude Fredericks il ripiano superiore della libreria nel suo studio, dove a occupare il posto d'onore erano i primi volumi della "Library of America",... more

Negli ultimi anni della sua vita Bernard Malamud indicava spesso all'amico e collega Claude Fredericks il ripiano superiore della libreria nel suo studio, dove a occupare il posto d'onore erano i primi volumi della "Library of America", la storica collana che il "New York Times Book Review" ha definito "il canone semiufficiale della letteratura americana". "Un giorno le mie opere saranno lassù" ripeteva l'anziano scrittore con un pizzico d'orgoglio, quasi a esorcizzare il suo timore ricorrente, quello di essere dimenticato. Nel 2014, in occasione del centenario della sua nascita, le opere di Malamud sono state finalmente inserite in due volumi della prestigiosa collana (a cui se ne aggiungerà un terzo), contemporaneamente alla pubblicazione in Italia del primo dei due Meridiani a lui dedicati.
Oltre a un'ampia bibliografia, una lunga cronologia e un sostanzioso apparato di notizie ai testi, il volume comprende il mio saggio introduttivo: "Malamud: secondo atto".

• • by Paolo Simonetti
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  • American Literature, Jewish American Literature, Native American Studies, American Studies

How did Jewish literature become American? Within approximately a century Jewish writers have established themselves as integral voices in US literature. This course examines how this process occurred in the 20th and 21st centuries as... more

How did Jewish literature become American? Within approximately a century Jewish writers have established themselves as integral voices in US literature. This course examines how this process occurred in the 20th and 21st centuries as Jewish narratives and languages encountered American modernism. We will examine transatlantic Yiddish modernism, immigrant and proletarian fictions, Jewish high modernist novels and short stories, Sephardic crypto-Jewish tales, Mizrachi narrative, and contemporary Jewish writing on alternative futures.

• • by Joe Lockard
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  • American Literature, Jewish American Literature, Jewish Studies, Jewish-American Literature

This essay discusses the recurring preoccupation in Jewish literature with the character of the nudnik, a popular figure in Jewish culture but a rather neglected one in scholarly studies. Even though the nudnik appears in many stories... more

This essay discusses the recurring preoccupation in Jewish literature
with the character of the nudnik, a popular figure in Jewish culture
but a rather neglected one in scholarly studies. Even though the
nudnik appears in many stories throughout the years, from
Sholem Aleichem’s, through Franz Kafka’s, to Isaac Bashevis
Singer’s stories and novels – nowhere was he more prominent
than in post–World War II Jewish American fiction, more
specifically in the short stories and novels of Philip Roth and
Bernard Malamud. Both Roth and Malamud depict the nudnik as
an embodiment of a generational divide, between the tormented
Americanized young and the tormenting “Ostjuden” old. And yet,
while Malamud’s nudniks serve as a critique on the fate of Jewish
culture and tradition in post-Holocaust America, Roth identifies
the character of the nudnik as a contaminating element that will
forever haunt the younger individual. By discussing the Yiddish
term “nudnik” and its ambivalent and unsettling nature in these
writers’ texts, this essay will highlight the cultural impact on
modern Jewish identity of the nudnik within each story.

• • by Noam Gil
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  • Jewish American Literature, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Sholem Aleichem
• • by Ronald Walker
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  • Jewish American Literature, Bernard Malamud, Teaching Bernard Malamud's _The Assistant_ , Patterns of Conversion in the Modern Novel

The modern campus novel, sometimes also referred to as the academic novel, emerged after World War II as a comic and satirical genre that focuses on professors rather than students and highlights the flaws of the rapidly expanding... more

The modern campus novel, sometimes also referred to as the academic novel, emerged after World War II as a comic and satirical genre that focuses on professors rather than students and highlights the flaws of the rapidly expanding academia. The article focuses on two campus novels of the 1960s, Bernard Malamud's A New Life (1961) and Malcolm Bradbury's Stepping Westward (1965), both of which feature a young instructor's quest into the unknown territory of a distant university. In Stepping Westward, the protagonist is James Walker, a British writer who accepts a one-year teaching post at an American university; in A New Life, the main character is Sy Levin, who moves from the East to the West of the United States to teach freshman composition at a small agricultural college. While both of the novels satirize provincial American universities for their utilitarian attitude to higher education, Bradbury's text extends its satire to his protagonist, who is mocked for his lack of independent thinking and assertive behavior. The two texts also illustrate the differences between the light-hearted British campus novel and its potentially darker American counterpart. Whereas Stepping Westward portrays the protagonist's stay at the university as a temporary escape from his marital and familial duties, A New Life presents a more complex story, of Sy's struggle for a new life, which he eventually achieves, even though in completely different terms than he might have expected.

• • by Petr Antene
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  • 20th Century American Literature, 20th Century British Literature, Bernard Malamud, Satire

Bernard Malamud's 1961 novel A New Life can be read as a satire on American Philistia from a Jewish point of view, but in the end it goes beyond satire. The coupling of Seymour Levin with Pauline Josephson, the wife of his boss and... more

Bernard Malamud's 1961 novel A New Life can be read as a satire on
American Philistia from a Jewish point of view, but in the end it goes beyond satire. The coupling of Seymour Levin with Pauline Josephson, the wife of his boss and enemy, and their absconding with her children, suggests a prophecy of a new age in which Jew and gentile combine in a generational assault on American values. In short, the Sixties.

• • by Tom Phillips
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  • Jewish American Literature, Christianity, Jewish - Christian Relations, 1950s (U.S. history)
• • by Ronald Walker
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  • Bernard Malamud, 20th Century American Fiction, Teaching Bernard Malamud's _The Assistant_

Examined as a whole, Bernard Malamud’s short story collection The Magic Barrel is more cosmopolitan moralism than ghetto tale, where Jews remain central protagonists but the particularities of Jewish life and suffering lose much of their... more

Examined as a whole, Bernard Malamud’s short story collection The Magic Barrel is more cosmopolitan moralism than ghetto tale, where Jews remain central protagonists but the particularities of Jewish life and suffering lose much of their cultural identification as Malamud reaches toward a universal ethical truth. I argue here that through the close reading of one those short stories, “The Lady of the Lake,” we can complement the general scholarly assessment of Malamud’s vision (of “Jews” as universals) with another, this one of Jews and Jewishness as in themselves the pathway to morality. “The Lady of the Lake” reveals Malamud at his most attuned to the complexities of Jewish self-recognition, where he thought that the ethical lay in the act of affirming one’s Jewish self-being.

• • by Samuel J Kessler
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  • Jewish Studies, Literature, Jewish Literature, Jewish Cultural Studies

Malamud emerged as a talented artist, depicting the life of the Jewish poor in New York. His creative works are appreciated for his allegory and mastery in the art of storytelling. Malamud was the son of Jewish grocers and he grew up in a... more

Malamud emerged as a talented artist, depicting the life of the Jewish poor in New York. His creative works are appreciated for his allegory and mastery in the art of storytelling. Malamud was the son of Jewish grocers and he grew up in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. Some argue that this was the reason that he wrote stories "set in small, prisonlike stores of various kinds" Malamud explores the social realism and ethnic identity in most of his short stories – ‘The Jew Bird,’ ‘Black is my Favorite Color’, ‘The German Refugee’. Malamud's fictional works also include themes of compassion, redemption, new life, the potential of meaningful suffering and self-sacrifice, all of which can be found in “The German Refugee” "The German Refugee" concludes Bernard Malamud's second collection of short stories, Idiots First (1963). The setting is New York City in the summer of 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II.

• • by Preeti Oza
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  • Holocaust Literature, Bernard Malamud, Short Stories, Refugee Crisis
• • by Christopher Criswell
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  • Jewish American Literature, Jewish-American Literature, Jacques Lacan, Lacanian theory

This essay focuses on the importance of war in "My Son the Murderer"-how an absurd violent world destroys any possibility of love. A modern version of the Greek tragedy, where the destiny imposed by gods on humans is replaced by the... more

This essay focuses on the importance of war in "My Son the Murderer"-how an absurd violent world destroys any possibility of love. A modern version of the Greek tragedy, where the destiny imposed by gods on humans is replaced by the destiny human violence imposes on people, the violence of war is depicted indirectly, in the drama of the protagonists. To expose this, I will use the transactional reader-response theory, pacifist feminist criticism, metaphor theory and psychoanalytical criticism.

• • by Michelle Renyé
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  • Bernard Malamud, Men & War, Violence in Feminist Analysis
• • by Simonetta Falchi
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  • Mythology And Folklore, English Literature, Jewish Studies, James Joyce