The Relation between Words and Worlds in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

This paper offers an analysis of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. In the first part, Chabon’s novel will be read as an example of what Linda Hutcheon has coined “historiographic metafiction”. In the second part, I will show that The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is an excellent illustration of Brian McHale’s definition of postmodern literature and that this postmodern identity plays an important role in expressing the novel’s main theme, escapism

An American Golem: Comic Books, Creation, and the Virtue of Escape in Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

This thesis examines Michael Chabon’s defense of escapist stories as manifested in his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000). Through this work, Chabon traces the history of escapist stories and superheroes in Judaism through the anthropomorphic figure of Jewish folklore, the golem. Chabon explores the ways in which the creation of a golem overlaps with the creation of a comic book. Additionally, Chabon shows the ability of escapist stories—those that allow the reader to leave reality and enter into fantasy—to facilitate healing from deep emotional wounds. This healing is demonstrated through the journey of the protagonist, Josef Kavalier, as he relies on fantastical stories—both written by others and himself—to reacclimate to the world after trauma. In response to those who claim that escapist literature is only a turning away from reality and history, Kavalier & Clay demonstrates the value of escapist stories in facilitating recovery from trauma

Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Post for the department of English & Humanities blog, Birkbec

The Depiction of the Holocaust within the Theme of Escape in Michael Chabon\u27s \u3ci\u3eThe Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay\u3c/i\u3e

Escape sounds like a ram’s horn throughout Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, looming large in the lives of his mostly Jewish characters. Only one, Josef Kavalier, is intimately tied to and escapes the Holocaust which destroys his entire family. The horrors of the Holocaust, however, cast a shadow that hovers over nearly every chapter of Chabon’s 636-page novel. For most of the novel’s other characters, intent on plotting their own escapes, the events of the Holocaust remain 4,000 miles away. Americans, Jew and gentile, politically astute and clueless, laborer and capitalist, prefer to maintain a safe distance in mind and in fact. While the Jews of Europe struggle to escape from the ghettos, boxcars, and death in the camps, the Americans of Kavalier & Clay take refuge in glamorous New York City with its big bands, surrealist art and the Golden Age of comic books. Critical opinion about how the Holocaust should be portrayed and to what end, varies widely. The work of Jewish-American fiction authors, such as Michael Chabon, who were not alive when Allied forces liberated the camps, has generated new and thoughtful avenues of criticism. “Will this lead to a trivialization of Holocaust memory,” Christoph Ribbat asks, “Or will these popular genres open the discourse of memory by making it more democratic and more accessible?” (206). At the heart of scholarly work surrounding Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel are questions about his depiction of the Holocaust in a work that is not ostensibly about the Holocaust, but one which never escapes it. In this thesis, I explore Chabon’s critique of America’s response to the plight of Europe’s Jews through the exploits of the Escapist, a golemlike comic book character designed to kill Hitler and defeat the Nazis. I examine his purpose in framing his novel within the Golden Age of the comic book industry and the avant-garde cultural life of New York City while the Nazis created a swath of deadly destruction in their march 7 across Europe. Central to my thesis is the theme of escape in the lives of the major characters as well as its role as an established policy in America with regard to the war in Europe. This thesis expands the critical conversation about Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, most particularly within the theme of escape, which has not been widely explored. I argue that Kavalier & Clay makes an important contribution to Holocaust literature in its portrayal of America’s effort to escape from an early and effective response to Hitler’s attempt to annihilate the entire Jewish population. I also contend that Kavalier & Clay is a novel that constitutes a thoughtful tribute to Holocaust victims through the frames of a comic book and a hero called the Escapist; it is a call to Americans to consider their responsibility in the face of today’s ongoing worldwide atrocities and civil injustices. Readers of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay are encouraged to look more deeply into the Holocaust for signposts and lessons as America continues to face questions of moral and ethical responsibility for its promises of liberty and justice for all. Through his novel, Chabon stimulates a unique and valuable understanding of the Holocaust’s place in post-World War II America

The rise of the comics künstlerroman, or, the limits of comics acceptance: the depiction of comics creators in the work of Michael Chabon and Emily St. John Mandel

The künstlerroman is a genre with a long and celebrated past. From Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park (2005) to John Irving’s The World According to Garp (1978) and Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift (1975), the genre has occupied a prominent place in bestseller lists and awards shortlists. The enduring popularity and continued critical celebration of the künstlerroman makes it all the more striking that, since the turn of the millennium a new kind of author-protagonist has emerged — the graphic-novelist-protagonist. This move not only inducts graphic novelists into this existing — and prestigious — literary genre, it also draws them into the same struggle for recognition in which other novelist-protagonists have long been involved. Drawing on the recent examples of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), in this article I argue that there is a clear move toward the serious discussion of comics and comics creators in contemporary literature, an increasing willingness to talk about comics and their makers that is marked by a surprising faith in the fitness of comics as a mode of self-expression and a recognition of the clear kinship between prose authors and graphic novelists.N/

The Inextinguishable Longing for Elsewhere: Escapism in Recent Pulitzer Prize Winning Novels

In reading a selection of Pulitzer Prize winning literature since 1980,1 found that many of the novels included characters who, either literally or metaphorically, longed to escape from the reality of their lives. Four novels in particular embodied this theme: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, Martin Dressier: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser, and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. All four books treated escape and escapism ambiguously-sometimes escape is a flaw; sometimes escape is a virtue. Upon closer readings of the four novels, I came to the conclusion that the deciding factor is hope. Escapism, when it is temporary and meant to inspire engagement with reality, is not only virtuous, but also has ties to the ideal of the American dream

Unbridled Imaginations: The Ethical Power of Creativity in Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Este trabajo de fin de grado se propone examinar la novela de Michael Chabon Las Asombrosas Aventuras de Kavalier y Clay en su relación con la tendencia, dentro de la narrativa estadounidense judía, a replantearse las ideas de tradición e identidad como respuesta al trágico período histórico que alcanzó su punto de inflexión tras el Holocausto. En este contexto, el autor contempla una intersección entre la reflexión sobre la propia escritura, propia del postmodernismo, y las posibilidades éticas de la narrativa. Teniendo en cuenta todas estas cuestiones, el objetivo de esta disertación es argumentar la posición de la novela con respecto al papel que juega la narrativa en la articulación del discurso de la alteridad. Con este fin, el trabajo se centra en analizar el uso de estrategias metaficcionales, así como el efecto que ejerce la lectura y la escritura sobre el plano ontológico de los protagonistas

Research on Jewish American Writers in Recent Ten Years

In recent ten years, Jewish American writers emerge in large numbers. Among them, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer and Michael Chabon are distinguished and popular among the readers. Their fictions represent the third generation of the Jewish writers and have their own characteristics, such as holocaust, Jewish identity and Jewish problems and so on. The thesis tries to summarize the literary review of the three writers and their common points in their works

Novel deceptions: historical illusionism in contemporary American fiction

This study investigates the subject of illusionism in contemporary American fiction. A recurrent yet under-examined theme, the history of stage magic in the U.S. suggests how an earlier age domesticated the seeming sorcery of market capitalism, credit, limitless self-(re)making, and ethnic vanishing. Such conditions provide antecedents and analogues for the writing of fiction in a world of digitalized knowledge, work, identity, and financialization. Self-reflexively illusionist fiction today represents itself ambivalently as magical entertainment. Is its function to mesmerize audiences or alert them to ideological sleight-of-hand? If the enchantments of literary art screen the machinations of power, how do novelists preserve fiction's capacity to inspire wonder, affective experience, and ethical commitment? Chapter One argues that Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian presents illusionism as integral to imperialism and commodification, as well as to its own artistry. McCarthy indicates the instrumentalization of aesthetics under late capitalism yet seeks through moments of enchantment to transcend it. Chapter Two shows that in Mr. Vertigo by Paul Auster and In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien, fiction’s "magic" lies in transcending social differences and inspiring empathy, but that the historical residue of racism in American illusionism obstructs the effort to imagine otherness. Both novels reframe the worth of fiction as therapeutic. Chapter Three argues that the figure of Harry Houdini embodies literature's status as primarily entertainment, inspiring wonder rather than critique. Michael Chabon's Kavalier & Clay celebrates escapistry, but seeks through Houdini to restore a utopian dimension to entertainment.2017-11-04T00:00:00