Abstract
The Dean’s December is a tale of two cities, Bucharest and Chicago, which become for the protagonist, Albert Corde, synecdoches for the communist East and the capitalist West. Strongly influenced by his reading of the poetry of William Blake, Corde explains that for him to understand “the underlying truth” of a city it must be passed through his soul, for cities are “emotional conditions.” According to Corde, authoritarian Bucharest is orderly, but it is also dour, ugly, and repressive; it is a penitentiary society that has suppressed the individual’s freedom. Chaotic Chicago has become “Cain’s city built with murder,” to borrow William Blake’s language. Corde decries the sacrifice of the black underclass to political and economic expediency as a moral and a spiritual failure; the actual slums reveal the slums of our innermost being. Like the English romantic poets whom he quotes, Corde is calling not only for us to address the dire situation of the black underclass but also to confront our own interior slums.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
References
Anderson, David D. 1985. The Dean’s Chicago. Midamerica 12: 136–147.
Bellow, Saul. 1975. A world too much with us. Critical Inquiry 2 (Autumn): 1–9.
Bellow, Saul. 1982. The Dean’s December. New York: Harper and Row.
Bellow, Saul. 1987. More die of heartbreak. New York: William Morrow.
Bellow, Saul. 2003. The adventures of Augie March. Fiftieth anniversary edition. New York: Viking.
Bellow, Saul. 2015. Chicago: The city that was, the city that is. In There is simply too much to think about: Collected nonfiction, ed. Benjamin Taylor, 374–379. New York: Viking.
Blake, William. 1982. In The complete poetry and prose of William Blake, ed. David E. Erdman. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Harper, Gordon Lloyd. 1994. The art of fiction: Saul Bellow. In Conversations with Saul Bellow, ed. Gloria L. Cronin and Ben Siegel. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Leader, Zachary. 2018. The life of Saul Bellow: Love and strife, 1965–2005. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Sartre, Jean Paul. 1968. Preface. In The wretched of the Earth, ed. Frantz Fanon, 7–31. New York: Grove Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Chavkin, A. (2020). Bucharest and Chicago: A Tale of Two Cities in Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December. In: Tambling, J. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_261-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_261-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-62592-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-62592-8
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities