Animals Speaking in the Fiction of Jin and Malamud

CLCWeb, Dec 2013

In his article "Animals Speaking in the Fiction of Jin and Malamud

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Animals Speaking in the Fiction of Jin and Malamud

and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture Matt Prater 0 Appalachian State University 0 0 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Part of the American Studies Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, and the Reading and Language Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. Recommended Citation Prater, Matt. "Animals Speaking in the Fiction of Jin and Malamud." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15.4 This text has been double-blind peer reviewed by 2+1 experts in the field. This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact for additional information. - Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb The above text, published by Purdue University Press ©Purdue University, has been downloaded 757 times as of 11/ UNIVERSITY PRESS <http://www.thepress.purdue.edu> CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb> Purdue University Press ©Purdue University CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." In addition to the publication of articles, the journal publishes review articles of scholarly books and publishes research material in its Library Series. Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Langua-ge Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monog-raph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <> 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)


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Matt Prater. Animals Speaking in the Fiction of Jin and Malamud, CLCWeb, 2013, Volume 15, Issue 4,