CAMILA WALLER MAURCIO DE FRANA

Take Home Norte Americana III

Here is the take home for Thursday, May 22nd.

Write around three paragraphs about the following topics (Illustrate your arguments with
passages taken form the text):

1. Oskar Gassner and his relation with canonical American literature.

As Oscar left his country because he couldnt bear what was happening in Germany, that
was the war and its violence, he moved to the U.S.A seeking the feeling of brotherhood
Germany lacked. The brotherhood which Whitman talks about in his poem Song of
myself, which Oscar reads in the end of the short story. Actually, he expresses himself
through this poem, through the American literature. However, its not enough for him.
Such brotherhood he thought he would find in the U.S., although, it doesnt happen
because his teacher, being an American, doesnt understand what is happening to him.
Oscar Gassner is trying to become an American while he loses his culture, so he is trying to
connect with American culture through its literature. And he succeeds, however American
culture, life wasnt what he needed it to be. He only found actually brotherhood in the
literature.

2. The role of language and a metafictional device in the short story "The German
Refugee".

The metafiction is very present in The German Refugee, because Bernard Malamud uses
the language to talk about the language. He exposes the methods of teaching a foreign
language, almost step by step. He shows through the main character, which is an language
teacher, the process of teaching, some techniques, some aspects of the language such as
pronunciation and phonetics that are part of the process of teaching and learning a new
language. As we can see in Lets stand at the mirror, could you say right?, No.
Right. You put your tongue here. I showed him where. [] The tip of it curls behind the
ridge on top, like this, Now say treasure thats harder. The tongue goes up in front,
not in the back of the mouth. Look. And it goes on through the short story.
However, the importance of language is bigger than that in the short story. In the end of
the story, it didnt make difference for Oscar that he had learned how to speak English,
because he had lost his identity. He had left his culture behind. He actually hated his own
people and country. And by doing that he was leaving behind his own language too, his
identity, because he wouldnt express himself in German anymore, only in English,
otherwise, he wouldnt be American, he wouldnt belong to this nation and culture. And
the language, as we can infer, is seen by Malamud in the short story as the expression of
thoughts. We can see that in this passage: To many of these people, articulate as they
were, the great loss was the loss of language that they could no longer say what was in
them to say. They could, of course, manage to communicate, but just to communicate was
frustrating or yet in I felt like a child, or worse, often like a moron. I am left with myself
unexpressed. What I knew, indeed, what I am, becomes to me a burden. My tongue hangs
useless.