{"id":2004,"date":"2014-07-06T13:03:54","date_gmt":"2014-07-06T13:03:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/?p=2004"},"modified":"2014-07-06T13:03:54","modified_gmt":"2014-07-06T13:03:54","slug":"are-categories-like-immigrant-fiction-and-new-american-fiction-valid-or-worthwhile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/are-categories-like-immigrant-fiction-and-new-american-fiction-valid-or-worthwhile","title":{"rendered":"Are Categories Like Immigrant Fiction and \u2018New American\u2019 Fiction Valid or Worthwhile?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By PANKAJ MISHRA and FRANCINE PROSE \u00a0JULY 1, 2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, Pankaj Mishra and Francine Prose discuss whether categories like immigrant fiction are useful or meaningful labels.<\/p>\n

By Pankaj Mishra<\/p>\n

Many of the writers who have revitalized American literature in recent years neither disown nor reclaim the past.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am an American, Chicago born,\u201d Augie March declares in Saul Bellow\u2019s 1953 novel, \u201cand go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way.\u201d \u201cThe Adventures of Augie March\u201d was the clearest sign that those who had grown up hearing Yiddish at home would redefine the traditions of American idealism and romanticism. March\u2019s resonant claim seems, in retrospect, not only to have released novels by Jewish-Americans from the ghetto of \u201cimmigrant fiction\u201d; it also announced that postwar American literature (and intellectual and political life in general) would be periodically renewed by the fresh stock of experience that people from other countries brought to a nation of immigrants \u2014 the sufferings of the old world, the intellectual and emotional awakening in the new, and the complex negotiation between the claims of the community and the temptations of individualism.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Pankaj Mishra Credit Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson<\/p>\n

Not everyone among the sentinels of Anglo-American culture was impressed by the greatest stylistic innovation since Hemingway. As late as 1965, Katherine Anne Porter denounced the new prose as \u201ca curious kind of argot, . . . a deadly mixture of academic, guttersnipe, gangster, fake-Yiddish and dull old worn-out dirty words \u2014 an appalling bankruptcy in language.\u201d But gentile resistance to swarthy barbarians at the gates has gradually broken down. Bellow\u2019s claim to American-ness coincided with a general expansion, after World War II, of the category of whiteness, which came to include Irish, Italians, Slavs and Greeks, if not Chinese, Hispanics, Native Americans and African-Americans. Indeed, assimilation appeared so successful that critics as various as Leslie Fiedler and Vivian Gornick worried that fiction by Jewish-Americans had lost its primary stimulus, its \u201cexistential outsiderness,\u201d as Gornick put it. Irving Howe even went on to attack what he called \u201cimmigrant chic\u201d and the \u201cwistful bewilderment\u201d of Jewish writers who were \u201cnostalgic for the nostalgia of other people.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For detail please visit here<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By PANKAJ MISHRA and FRANCINE PROSE \u00a0JUL … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[107,232],"tags":[550,548,547,549],"views":970,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2004"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2004"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2004\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2005,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2004\/revisions\/2005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}