從迷失到覺醒──修配工中雅科夫之變形記

1、 1Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Life of Bernard Malamud Born in a Jewish immigrant family in Brooklyn, New York 1914, Malamud spent his early childhood in a small grocery store run by his parents, Bertha Fidelman Malamud

2、 and Max Malamud, who moved from Russia in the early 20th century. At that time, the impoverished family led a miserable life, but Malamud was strongly encouraged by his parents to receive good education. He attended Era

3、smus Hall High School between 1928 and 1932, and then received his Bachelor’s degree from the City College of New York in 1936 and Master’s degree from Columbia University in 1942. After graduation, the impact of the 192

4、9 Great Depression failed Malamud’s plan to find a teaching position in New York City, and instead he accepted a federal appointment with the Bureau of Census in Washington D.C. In 1945, he married Ann de Chiara, an Ital

5、ian woman, and had a son, Paul. Four years after marriage, Malamud was offered a position in the English Department at Oregon State College, Corvallis, teaching courses of freshman composition and sometimes introductory

6、courses to literature, and managed to get promoted to associate professor in 1959. However, the difficulty to pursue a writing career was strongly felt in Oregon State College because it was a technical and agricultural

7、school and in 1961 Malamud joined the faculty of the Language and Literature Division in Bennington College, Vermont. Afterwards, he focused his attention on writing and became quite successful: eight novels and four col

8、lections of short stories were published; two National Book Awards and one Pulitzer Prize and numerous other honors received; and memberships in the National Institute of Arts and Letters Book Award Committee, and Americ

9、an Academy Arts and Sciences granted. In 1986, a sudden heart attack took away this great writer’s life at the age of seventy-two. Malamud started writing stories when he was teaching in night classes during 1940s and ha

10、d short pieces and novels published in consequence since then. His childhood memories in Brooklyn, marriage life with Ann and traveling experiences in 3significance of responsibility, best exemplified in the case of Yako

11、v Bok in The Fixer. But it is not Malamud’s desire to exclude men as a whole. As a matter of fact, he chooses the Jews, a group of selected people who have undergone thousands’ of years of tortures, as a symbol for the m

12、ankind in a dehumanizing modern world. Largely influenced by such romanticists as Emerson and Hawthorne, Malamud makes his moral stories delightful in prose reading and thoughtful in moral teaching. However, too much em

13、phasis upon morality in Malamud’s works might underestimate their aesthetic values. Hershinow points out that “artists cannot be ministers, and as soon as they attempt it, they destroy their artistry” (1980: 2). In his n

14、ovels and short stories, Malamud is careful dealing with every detail, ranging from the characters’ names, for example, Yakov Bok means in German the scapegoat, to their physical characteristics and occupations; paradoxe

15、s and symbols are frequently used; and a dialect style calling the sound of Yiddish. The distinctive Jewish style of humor is another striking feature in Malamud’s writings. Traditionally, Jewish humor is “stark, edged a

16、nd cynical” (Malin, 1973: 186) and often regarded as “coarse and bawdy” (ibid.). Though Malamud takes all elements of Jewish humor, his mode of fantastic comedy are particularly interesting and successful. In his artisti

17、c world, the fantastic stuffings are taken as something real, which makes all the unusual events seem “as ordinary as bread” (ibid., 186-187). In fact, this sort of humor serves as a bridge, connecting the spiritual purs

18、uits and the real situation of Jewish people, and to give them the strength to face the miserable reality. Malamud is entitled to be called the heir to rich Jewish traditions, because he remakes and reinvigorates them in

19、 his own way. In this paper, analysis will be centered upon Malamud’s masterpiece The Fixer. Malamud once recalled why he started to write The Fixer: “after I wrote ‘The German Refugee’ I was determined to do a novel u

20、sing political or social experience as the basis of my fiction” (1996: 139). As one of the finest novels by Malamud, The Fixer is based upon a real criminal case told by his father when he was a boy, the case of Mendel B