Saul Bellow, The Dean's December

Gloria Cronin (Brigham Young University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1982

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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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 Romanian 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 Romania, Corde is afforded a comparison of Bucharest and Chicago as he develops his tale of two cities. The moral, economic, and physical decay of both the communist regime in Bucharest, 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 time, never stopped communing with themselves, nobody had a…

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816 words

Citation: Cronin, Gloria. "The Dean's December". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 October 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1107, accessed 25 April 2024.]

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