Posted on 05/03/2010 1:16:39 PM PDT by Borges
There weren’t that many superheroes in the 40s. And not all comics come from America, most of Europe has a comic tradition, but we don’t read those over here. Of course if you’re going to talk roots you need to remember that Batman is really just a ripoff of Zorro.
Batman was explictedly drawn (by his Jewish creator) from the Go’el Haddam, the Avenger of the Blood — the Next of Kin whose mitzva it was to avenge the murder of his family.
The link is above.
Although Wikipedia does not mention it I can get other google hits that indicate that Fritz Leiber was Jewish.
You can’t get any more fantasy than Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.
Bob Kane specifically calls out Zorro as a source of influence on Batman. Of course Zorro rips off parts of Robin Hood and the Scarlet Pimpernel. Stories truly made up of whole cloth are a rare thing, and usually not very good, they don’t get to learn from other people’s mistakes.
Pardon me for butting in.
Wheel of Time is actually not in compliance with the author’s theory that fantasy writing is by definition anglophilic. It’s based on a wide variety of mythologies, including Sumerian and various eastern religions. The central image of the Wheel of Time is about as unchristian as one can get. The names of many of the chief characters are drawn from Norse and Slavic legend.
One of the things I’ve liked best about the series is the unpredictability that springs from this. It doesn’t “feel” as much like a LOTR clone as most fantasy. While I cede precedence as a Tolkien fanatic to nobody, poor imitations do get boring. As others have pointed out, the WOTseries is presently about 5 books too long, with two more to go.
BTW, Tolkien’s works drew heavily on Welsh and Finnish as well as Norse and Anglo-Saxon mythologies.
Didn’t say there was, but his creation predates Batman and Kane specifically sites a Zorro movie in the creation of Batman.
Disagree.
Tolkien was very clear that he was happy for readers to find deeper meanings in his works. He just objected to writers ponderously enforcing allegory, as Lewis was prone to do.
One is the freedom of the reader, the other is the tyranny of the author.
If anybody is interested, I could talk all week about how Tolkien's world has deep inner meaning applicable to the great challenges of the 20th century.
For starters, his Dark Lords start off as good guys, sincerely trying to bring a little order out of chaos for the good of the people. When the people don't cooperate fully, they're forced to use more and more coercion to maintain progress towards the ultimate goal, again all for the good of the people. In the beginning.
The good guys, OTOH, such as Gandalf, never even attempt to force someone else to follow them, respecting that person't free will as a gift of God.
If that paradigm isn't relevant to the history of the 20th century, I don't know what would be.
There’s a difference between “dialect” and simply different usages of the language. Mark Twain was intentionally conveying a distinctive speech of a particular milieu, while Winston Churchill’s style was mainly narrative and his usage unique to himself.
It’s not just Mark Twain ... I don’t enjoy attempts to recreate distinctive spoken language in writing. No matter how good the author is, it just seems fake to me. A good recorded-book presented can make it work if he’s not too tied to the phonemes the author put on the page.
Even his early Linguistics output?
Chomsky’s theories of linguistics are not free of controversy, but it’s beyond my competence to say whether his work in that speciality reflects the moonbattery of the rest of his intellectual processes.
Avram Davidson?
Avram Davidson (April 23, 1923 – May 8, 1993) was an American Jewish writer of fantasy fiction, science fiction, and crime fiction, as well as the author of many stories that do not fit into a genre niche. He won a Hugo Award and three World Fantasy Awards in the science fiction and fantasy genre, a World Fantasy Life Achievement award, and a Queen’s Award and an Edgar Award in the mystery genre. Davidson edited The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from 1962 to 1964. His last novel The Boss in the Wall: A Treatise on the House Devil was completed by Grania Davis and was a Nebula Award finalist in 1998. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says “he is perhaps sf’s most explicitly literary author”.
That's a topic that interests me. Would you (and others) define Ray Bradbury, for instance, as a science-fiction author?
Also, how is "Jewish" defined? Would secular Jews be counted along with religiously observant Jews?
As to being Jewish, Tolkien regretted that "I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people." Needless to say, C. S. Lewis wasn't Jewish either, though he did marry a Jewish convert to Anglican Christianity... Tolkien had famously converted his friend and fellow Oxford don [Lewis] from skepticism to Christianity through a series of conversations that led Lewis to the realization that "the story of Christ is simply a true myth."
I would describe what I’ve read of Ray Bradbury’s as science fiction, rather than fantasy. How the author would identify “Jewish,” I do not know, but a case might be made that there’s a Jewish cultural mindset, irrespective of religious belief, that could affect approaches to literature.
What about some Isaac Basehvis Singer?
What about Borges, you don’t like him?
I think Magic Realism descends from writes like Dickens, Poe, Gogol, Dostoevsky, eventually to Kafka. I’m not crazy about Gabriel Garcia Marquez and ones like that. But Jorge Luis Borges is definitely a keeper.
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