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Course Description

Summary

We will immerse ourselves in the novels and stories of three extraordinary American writers of the mid-20th and early 21st centuries, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. We'll be starting with Malamud, then turning to Bellow, and finally to Roth, almost twenty  years the youngest and still very much a dominant -- if self-proclaimed "retired" -- figure in contemporary American literature. Although each of them has insisted his work should be read as American, purely, with no ethnic prefix, we would miss an essential richness of their subject matter if we ignored their common Jewish ethnicity and the way it is braided through their work. Consequently, central among the questions we'll be asking is how each writer uses his heritage as a vital and inextricable component of his fiction.