Jewish Literature

Definition  Jewish literature refers to published creative writings by American Jews about their American experiences. This kind of writings is shown in Jewish perspective.

Jewish Point of View  Jews believe that God has sent perpetual sufferings to his chosen people to strengthen and purify them, and they are the “chosen people”.

 Humour is a prominent aspect of Jewish point of view. It is often a twisted kind of comedy to keep them from despair. Jews are able to laugh at themselves, so some of their best humour is self-mocking.

 Jews lay emphasis upon the power of intellects. The power to understand their own experience to judge their own life rationally to think well is considered a high virtue.

 Self-teaching is at the heart of almost all Jewish novels. The Jewish heroes often try to seek a rational interpretation of the world through their own experience in it.

Saul Bellow  life

works  Dangling Man  The Adventures of Augie March

point of view  Saul Bellow’s strength lies in his faith in man and man’s ability to offer a “spirited resistance to the forces of our time”. As he sees it, modern man has lived through frustration and defeat, managed to grapple with destructive historical pressures, and striven for “certain durable human goods” – truth, freedom, and wisdom.

 He is highly critical of modern life in which the old value system is no longer functioning. His major characters are all concerned to find a way that would keep American civilization from going under. They body forth Bellow’s credo that art has “something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos”, and that “a novelist begins with disorder and disharmony and goes toward order by an unknown process of the imagination”.

characteristics of his heroes  Most of Saul Bellow’s heroes are marginal men, alienated or absurd characters caught between their own inadequacies and those imposed upon them by their friends and society.  Most of them are Jewish intellectuals or writers who try to discover the queerness of existence and overcome it. Struggling with the impersonality of the physical world, agonized by their own awareness of morality, his protagonists laugh at their own deficiency with irony because it relieves despair.

 The hunger for community, yet they hold back because that world have to betray the sanctity of their private self in order to achieve it.  style: realism + modernism

African American Literature  oral tradition  songs and ballads  spirituals: sorrow of the singers’ earlier condition and longing for freedom  blues: after civil war, derived from work songs – loneliness, separation, losses, wonderings, love, desperation, sense of doom  jazz: after WWI, developed from blues, died out in the Great Depression

written literature (from 1760s)  poetry: religious, enduring, patient to the white  slave narrative: autobiographical experience of the person  1920s: Harlem Renaissance – New York, black – black dialect and black folklore – “the new negro” – representatives: Langston Hughes (“black poet laureate”), Huston, Claude McKay  1940s: Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison  50s~60s: a lot of black writers emerged in the civil rights movement: James Baldwin, Brooks, Jones  70s~80s: publishing of “Root” (Alex Haley), Walker – “The Colour Purple”, Morrison (the second woman writer and the only black who won Nobel Prize)

Richard Wright  life  works  Uncle Tom’s Children: Four Novellas  Native Son  Black Boy  The Outsider (the first novel of existentialism in America, published in France)

themes and subjects  His common theme is to condemn racism, urge reform, criticize evils of society. His books focus on racial conflict and physical violence. They review the devastating effect of institutionalized hatred (hatred brought by social system) and humiliation on black males’ psyche. They affirmed dignity and humility of society’s outcasts.  writing techniques – realism, naturalism  He tries to show that people cannot escape from society. Therefore, society must be changed. He is a father figure, especially to the writers of violence.

Ralph Ellison  life  works: Invisible Man  significance: It has a universality of theme (problems of all modern people), not only regional dilemma of existence.  attitude: complexity of art – the best art makes good politics, not vice versa.

James Baldwin  life  works  Go Tell It on the Mountain  Notes of a Native Son  Nobody Knows My Name  The Fire Next Time  point of view  Baldwin calls for the blacks to resort to means including force so as to bring about the nation’s self-realization. He saw love and understanding as difficult but necessary way to overcome racial conflict.  themes: race, homosexuality

Alice Walker  life  works  Once (a collection of poems)  In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (“womanism” instead of feminism)  The Colour Purple (epistolary)

Toni Morrison  life  works  The Bluest Eye  Song of Solomon (the best black novel after Native Son and Invisible Man)  Tar Baby  Beloved  themes: love, guilt, history, individual, gender, race, religion  purpose: to empower the black people to act for themselves, to recognize for their own world, own history, own reality  style – many kinds of factors: naturalism, realism, fantasy, reality, magical realism