%0 Thesis %A Limberis, Larissa %D 2017 %T Jewish poetics in Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King (1959) %U https://bridges.monash.edu/articles/thesis/Jewish_poetics_in_Saul_Bellow_s_Henderson_the_Rain_King_1959_/4657525 %R 10.4225/03/58a50d4037d84 %K 1959.1/932234 %K monash:120834 %K Jewish poetics %K thesis(masters) %K ethesis-20140527-14312 %K 2014 %K Restricted access %K Bellow, Saul. Henderson the Rain King %X This thesis brings attention to the unique Jewish American intonation in Saul Bellow's novel Henderson the Rain King (1959). It investigates the novel's intertextual references, which include a range of Jewish and existentialist sources; and it locates the work within the history of Jewish immigration and intellectual life in the United States. While Bellow's other novels have received a great deal of scholarly attention, Henderson has been a conspicuous exception, and only a few responses have touched upon its Jewishness. This thesis identifies three foundational references featured in the novel: the modern Yiddish literature of Sholem Aleichem and S.Y Abramovitsh; the Bible; and existentialism. In doing so this thesis investigates the comically subversive manner in which Bellow portrays the only non-Jewish protagonist in his oeuvre. The underlying argument of this thesis is that Bellow's humor served as a response to those aspects of Western civilization that he deemed to be problematic. This thesis proposes that Bellow expressed his controversial views in Henderson by camouflaging them in a bewildering symbolic landscape and in layers of contradicting discourses, many of which rely on Jewish and Jewish-American knowledge.

The Author is now known as Larissa Sutherland.
%I Monash University