The Dean’s December (1982) is a somewhat wintry piece which lacks the balancing comedy of Humboldt’s Gift. Dean Albert Corde, a resident of Chicago, travels with his Roumanian wife, Minna, back to her home country where the couple attend the dying process of her famous mother, Valeria Raresh. From the vantage point of Roumania, Corde is afforded a comparison of Budapest and Chicago as he develops his tale of two cities. The moral, economic, and physical decay of both the fascist regime in Budapest, and the capitalist democracy in Chicago are counterpointed. He watches the diminishing of the human factor in both cities and enters a great nightmare in which he observes that “although people talked to themselves all the t

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Published 23 October 2003

Citation: Cronin, Gloria. "The Dean’s December". The Literary Encyclopedia. 23 October 2003.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1107, accessed 21 November 2009.]