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Dossier de littérature en anglais: l'écrivain dans son siècle

Dissertation : Dossier de littérature en anglais: l'écrivain dans son siècle. Recherche parmi 297 000+ dissertations

Par   •  3 Juin 2013  •  Dissertation  •  950 Mots (4 Pages)  •  801 Vues

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Dossier de littérature en langue étrangère

Intro: The three texts are grouped under a single theme: the writer in his century.

This file includes three texts:

- Getting Old by Bernard Malamud

- Strange Fruit by Lewis Allan

- American Pastoral by Philip Roth

These three texts all have common element, the minorities in a country. What image of minorities do these 3 texts raise?

In Strange Fruit, this poem denounces the lynching of black people by white people in the Southern states of the USA. In Getting Old and American Pastoral, the characters are from poor immigrant Jews in background.

Description: In the text of Bernard Malamud, the main character is about is a Jew, a Jewish grocer but moreover he is an old man unable to compete with the” expanding supermarket trade” as any old man would, Jewish or not. Morris, the main character here, has known success in business and realized in his time his American Dream. Unluckily for him, he became old when things changed and he could not go a prospering with the former good little business. Consequently, he finds himself at the bottom of the social ladder again, trying to find a way to start climbing it again, but with more difficulty due to his age. At the same time, he meets bosses who look at him strangely as his age and origin, he is now a full American citizen show he is in the wrong place he should be one of them, instead of asking them for a job, he probably was a boss who hired others.

In Strange Fruit, Abe Meeropol under the pseudonym of Lewis Allan denounces the lynching of black people by white people, often by the KKK, in the Southern states of the USA. It denounces the situation all the more violently as it appears quiet at first. Fruit is developed through unexpected, even horrible elements that are a progression into unnaturalness, a threshold of horror: the repetition of blood. So the image of the orchard at the beginning has led to a scene of horror, not of nature.

In American Pastoral, the story takes place during the second world war; when, in Europe, other Jews were persecuted and exterminated, when American soldiers, and among them other Jews from that community were fighting and might not come back. At first, this young Jewish boy helped the community forget these horrors and get some comfort and warmth from one of them who was a hero. The parents are shown as former immigrants who believe in the American Dream and want their children to study to become good and especially successful Americans. The Swede, as he was nicknamed, had managed to turn what had been Jews sad routine, like Pogroms or persecutions” physical aggression”, into something positive, through sport, the way the Americans saw it.

Differences: In Getting Old, the main character was probably well-known Bernard Malamud’s readers at the time when he published his book, that is to say that Jews were probably among the best examples of the American Dream, the ideal of success and wealth for poor immigrants in the USA through hard work.Yet nothing really happens to him to make his situation better: he cannot see the name of a job he could do and sees men go into on the agency for them, the job for counter man he had

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