Neil Simon’s Jewish Writing In The Context Of Assimilation

All the time,assimilation is the focused issue of minority writers.For minority writers,ethnic writing is a progress of constructing their own ethnic identity and cultural identity.Neil Simon,as known as "king of Broadway",reflects the identity confusion of Jewish immigrants in the contemporary American society in the form of comedy.The ethnic writing of Neil Simon combines with the social background at that time and reflects the maturity of his cognition on assimilation.As a Jewish comedist in the contemporary America,Neil Simon writes the social life,ethnic memory and cultural psychology of American Jews in his plays,based on the simple daily life.It shows his thinking on the ethnic identity choice and Jewish culture cognition.Combining with social background and identity theory,this paper attempts to analyze Neil Simon’s cognition of ethnic assimilation and the plight of American Jewish cultural value orientation in the postmodern context.This paper analyzes his variation of ethnic assimilation and Jewish identity and discusses the plight of American Jewish cultural value orientation.The introduction of this paper discusses the definition of Jews and Jewish,and briefly reviews the Jewish immigration history to the United State and the development of American ethnic assimilation theory,for providing the background and starting point of analysis for later.In the meantime,the body of this paper was divided into three chapters by the three periods of Neil Simon’s ethnic assimilative articulation and three plays of his.The first chapter researches on Neil Simon’s early ethnic assimilative articulation and the cause of it by the concept of Angelo-conformity.The earliest chapter also analyzes Simon’s inheritance of traditional comedy of manners and Aristotle’s ethics in a Jewish way.The second chapter firstly researches on Simon’s variational cognition of ethnic assimilation and the revealation of Jewishness by discussing the theme of "suffering" in Jewish literature.Secondly,this chapter analyzes the modern significance of Jewish cohesion and reshaping which caused by the Holocaust.The third chapter researches on the establishment of Neil Simon’s cognition of ethnic assimilation and future of American Jews with the aid of the "Melting Pot" theory.This chapter study on the dual characters of modern American Jews in the transition of era and nation relying on Benedict Anderson’s "imagined communities" theory as a foundation,and the attempt of establishing American Jews as a new nation.Meanwhile,the author analyzes the reflection of Neil Simon’s expectation for the future by the form of comedy in this chapter.Neil Simon is a representative of American popular literature.The Canonization of popular literature is an inevitable trend in the process of modernization,In conclusion,this paper rethink Simon’s literature position in American Jewish Literature,and attempt to redefine and examine popular literature in the modern context.In the context of multicultural globalization,minority literature not only reflects the diversity of world literature,but also the reflection of national minority culture.On one hand,Jewishness writing of Neil Simon reflects his thinking on ethnic identity and the balance between actual reality and artistic reality.On the other hand,it shows the possibility of the harmonious development of multicultural literature.