Animals Speaking in the Fiction of Jin and Malamud
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Volume 15 Issue 4 (December 2013) Article 1
Matt Prater,
"Animals Speaking in the Fiction of Jin and Malamud"
Contents of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15.4 (2013)
<http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol15/iss4/>
"The Jewbird" by Bernard Malamud and "A Composer and His Parakeets" by Ha Jin as transcultural
texts which involve non-human animals as major characters. Jin and Malamud examine differing
representations of animal language and how these representations connect to the politics of both
interspecies and transnational relationships. By applying critical animal studies and transnational
discourse and by charting the interlinking of other-ings by theorists such as Carol Adams and Susan
Kappeler, Prater attempts to show that animals figure into transcultural and transnational
discourses in ways other than the symbolic.
Matt PRATER
Animals Speaking in the Fiction of Jin and Malamud
There are a number of similarities between the works of Ha Jin's (金雪飛) and Bernard Malamud's
works which suggest comparative study of their fiction, especially their short stories. Both are
writers who, to apply to both Jerry A. Varsava's statement with regard to Jin that the "prose style
[suggest] a constrained realism that derives largely from [their] early exposure to the great
Russian writers of the nineteenth century … but also from the profound challenge of writing in a
borrowed idiom" (2). The idioms they inhabit may be different, of course: for Jin, it is his English,
his second language, acquired during the process of his immigration from China to the United
States and for Malamud, it is the Yiddish-inflected English of East European Jewish American
immigrants of the generation preceding his own. Yet what holds true for both writers is that they
are writing from a space that can be considered transcultural, if not always (in Malamud's case)
transnational. Both writers have stories which deal with the underbellies of immigrant experience
and the problematic scripts of US-Americanization, both have written about the experiences of
specific ethnic communities in specific locations in New York City, and both have written extended
animal fables which involve transformative relationships between humans and animals.
I am positing the above because it may seem obvious, almost inevitable, that a study of these
writer's stories, especially in conjunction, would remain centered on humanistic issues. But the
moral landscape of both writers and their focus on the oppressed and marginalized allows for
readings which expand beyond human ethical considerations and take in the experiences of other
grou (...truncated)