Unit 16 Asian American Literature & Jewish American Literature

Asian American Literature  Asian-American literature has usually been presented primarily from the standpoint of “race”—the identity position of Americans of Asian descent in the context of Asian-American immigration histories and legislative struggles against unjust policies and racial violence.  Influenced by the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Asian American scholars argue that Asian-American “sensibility” was an American phenomenon different from and unrelated to Asian cultural sources.

The History of Chinese-American Immigrants  The first immigrants from China(in the mid-nineteenth century)  The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)  After the Exclusion Act (1943)

Representative Chinese-American Writers  Sui Sin Far ( 水仙花）： Mrs. Spring Fragrance （ 1912 ）  Pardee Lowe( 刘裔昌 ): Father and Glorious Descendant (1943)  Jade Snow Wong( 黄玉雪 ): Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945)  Louis Chu’s ( 雷霆超 ) ： Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961)  Maxine Hong Kingston （汤亭亭）： The Woman Warrior (1976)  David Henry Hwang’s （黄哲伦） plays ： M. Butterfly (1989)  Amy Tan’s ( 谭恩美）： The Joy Luck Club (1989)  Gish Jen’s （任碧莲） Typical American (1991)

Asian American Literature  Memoirs were the favored genre with immigrant and first-generation writers.  After Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir The Woman Warrior (1976), much Asian-American writing has also received critical acclaim. A 1974 anthology by Frank Chin, etc. Published in 1991

Woman Warrior Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts By Maxine Hong Kingston

a Chinese-American writer, Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley

Biography  Maxine Hong Kingston was born on October 27, 1940 in Stockton, California.  The first of six American-born children in the family of Tom and Ying Lan Hong;

 Her mother trained as a midwife in To Keung School of Midwifery in Canton.midwife

 Her father had been brought up a scholar and taught in his village of Sun Woi, near Canton. Tom left China for America in 1924 and took a job in a laundry.laundry 

 An extremely bright student, she won eleven scholarships that allowed her to attend the University of California at Berkeley.  Kingston began as an engineering major, but she soon switched to English literature.  B.A. degree in 1962  Teaching certificate in  In 1962, she married Earll Kingston, an actor, and moved to Hawaii where they both taught for the next ten years.

Works  I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, 2011  Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, 2006  The Fifth Book of Peace, 2003  To Be The Poet (2002)  Conversations With Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)  Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989)  Hawaii One Summer (1987)  China Men (1980)  The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976)

Awards  General Nonfiction Award: National Book Critics Circle for The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, 1976  Anisfield-Wolf Race Relations Award, 1978  National Endowment for the Arts Writers Award, 1980  National Book Award for General Nonfiction for China Men, 1981 [1] [1]  National Endowment for the Arts Writers Award, 1982  PEN West Award in fiction for Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, 1989  Lifetime Achievement Award from the Asian American Literary Awards, 2006  Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, 2008 [6] [6]

Woman Warrior

Plot  Part 1 No Name Woman  The narrator is recounting her mother’s talk story of the no-name woman.  In mother’s voice: Adultery, drowning herself and the newborn baby  In Maxine’s voice(alternate versions of tales): a victim of a rape; a rebel, embracing the feminine sexuality,

Woman Warrior: Part 2 White Tiger  "White Tigers" is based on another talk- story, one about the mythical female warrior Fa Mu Lan.  In the first-person narrative, Fa Mu Lan’s training on the White Tiger Mount and the experiences of being a Woman warrior  After her battles,as a model wife and mother.  Maxine's frustrated and baffled experiences of being a woman warrior in her American life.

Part3 Shaman  "Kingston's mother, Brave Orchid, and her astounding and terrifying old past in China.  Brave Orchid was a powerful doctor, midwife, and destroyer of ghosts back in her village.  At the end of the chapter, reconciliation between the mother and the daughter

Part 4 At the Western Palace  At the Western Palace: emperor who had many concubines. (an analogy )  Moon Orchid's husband, now a successful Los Angeles doctor, had left her behind in China and remarried in America.  Brave Orchid urges her sister into a disastrous confrontation with the man to demand her due as his wife.  As a result, she eventually goes crazy and dies in a California state mental asylum.

Part 5 A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe  American daughter’s anger and frustration in trying to express herself and attempting to please an unappreciative mother.  Later in her life, however, Kingston comes to appreciate her mother's talk-stories.  At the end of the chapter she even tells one herself: the story of Ts'ai Yen.  Maxine combines very different worlds and cultures and create her own voice and story.

Characters  Maxine Hong Kingston  No-Name Woman  Fa Mu Lan  Brave Orchid  Moon Orchid  Ts'ai Yen

Jewish American Literature

 Jewish American Literature is a unique part of American literature.  The full arrival of competent mature Jewish literature occurred by the end of the World War Ⅱ.  Since Saul Bellow and Isaac Bashevis Singer received Nobel Prizes in 1976 and 1978 respectively, the status of Jewish literature as an important part of American literature has been firmly established.

Terms for Jewish American Literature 1) Diaspora: the dispersion of the Jews among the Gentiles after their period of exile. 2) Jewish assimilation: ever since falling into Babylonian Captivity, the Jews have been forced or “seduced” to be assimilated wither into the Christian world or into the Muslin world. 3) Major themes: Jewish suffering; Jewish humor; new life; “go out—exodus complex” father and son; emotional and spiritual loss; assimilation and acculturation; redemption.

Terms for Jewish American Literature  Traits of characters: endurance; schlemiel— fool; stubborn; love.  Narrative strategies: a. Jewish setting; b. Jewish characters; c. Jewish stories; d. Jewish point of view/orientation.  Jewish humor

Some Major Writers and Works 1. Isaac Bashevis Singer ( ) 2. Bernard Malamud ( ) 3. Saul Bellow ( ) 4. Philip Roth (1933-)

Saul Bellow (1915 –2005)

Saul Bellow ——Winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature

Saul Bellow,a Canadian-born American writer.

In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited,Nobel Committee "the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age." [1] [1] [1].Press Release: The Nobel Prize in Literature, 1976, Swedish Academy

Awards  the Pulitzer Prize  the Nobel Prize for Literature  the National Medal of Arts  the National Book Award for Fiction three times  the Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990

Works  Dangling Man (1944)  The Victim (1947)  The Adventures of Augie March (1953) — National Book Award for Fiction  Seize the Day (1956)  Henderson the Rain King (1959)  Herzog (1964) — National Book Award  Mr. Sammler's Planet(1970) — National Book Award  Humboldt's Gift (1975) — winner of the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction  The Dean's December (1982)  More Die of Heartbreak (1987)

Works  A Theft (1989)  The Bellarosa Connection (1989)  The Actual (1997)  Ravelstein(2000)  Short Story Collections:  Mosby's Memoirs (1968)  Him with His Foot in His Mouth (1984)  Something to Remember Me By: Three Tales (1991)  Collected Stories (2001)

His best novels are as follows:

Biography  Born in Quebec in 1915 in a Russian-Jewish family.  When Bellow was nine, his family moved to the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago.  Bellow's mother, Liza, who was deeply religious, died when he was 17.  She wanted her youngest son, Saul, to become a rabbi or a concert violinist. (Saul rebeled)  He began writing at a young age.

 Bellow attended the University of Chicago but later transferred to Northwestern University.  He graduated with honors in anthropology and sociology.  In the 1930s, Bellow was part of the Chicago branch of the Works Progress Administration Writer's Project.  During World War II, Bellow joined the merchant marine and during his service he completed his first novel, Dangling Man (1944) about a young Chicago man waiting to be drafted for the war.

 From 1946 through 1948 Bellow taught at the University of Minnesota, living on Commonwealth Avenue, in St. Paul, Minnesota.  In 1948, Bellow was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed him to move to Paris, where he began writing The Adventures of Augie March (1953).  Bellow lived in New York City for a number of years, but he returned to Chicago in 1962 as a professor at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.  Bellow won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1976.Nobel Prize

 Bellow was married five times, with all but his last marriage ending in divorce.  He died on April 5, 2005, at age 89 in Brookline, Massachusetts. He is buried at the Jewish cemetery Shir HeHarim of Brattleboro, Vermont.

 In his novels and short stories, Bellow most often focuses on the lives and intellectual adventures of men and women in American cities, most often Chicago or New York City.

Looking For Mr. Green  Plot  The story is set in Chicago in the depressed 1930s. The third-person narrative follows George Grebe, a thirty-five-year-old lecturer of classical languages, in his new job of delivering relief checks to disabled people in the black district.  It is a chilly late November day and Grebe cannot find Mr. Tulliver. Finally he found Mr. Green’s house and a naked, drunken woman opens the door. Grebe gives the woman the check and leaves with a feeling of satisfaction that Mr. Green after all could be found.

Character  The story is told by a third-person narrator who has access to Grebe’s consciousness. It is introduced by the motto ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might...’, which well characterizes the main theme  Grebe is Bellow's typical twentieth-century character, having "an immense desire for certain durable human goods—truth, for instance, or freedom, or wisdom" (from the author's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976).

Analysis of Grebe  The protagonist is an ordinary marginalized intellectual whose one extraordinary quality is the energy with which he is ready to apply himself in his job.  Grebe’s serious attitude to his job ←→ the lax approach of Mr Raynor  Grebe’s earnestness ←→ the low-life environment in the Great Depression  His devotion causes some embarrassing moments.  His reward is the feeling of deep satisfaction.

Writing Style  1. The writing style of Saul Bellow is unique in its descriptive nature, which is full of blatant cultural and historical references.  Great Depression  2. His characters. His protagonists are atypical, yet extraordinary, and portrayed with tremendous detail.  Both major and minor personalities are given attention, and discussed in a manner that supports the theme of the story.

Questions  1. Describe the conversation between Grebe and Raynor, his supervisor. Grebe is surprised by the direction that this conversation takes. Why? Does he find it comforting or disconcerting?

 2. What is Grebe's attitude toward African Americans, the people among whom he goes looking for Mr. Green? Over the course of the story, is there any transformation in the way that he sees them?