Martín Urdiales Shaw

American 20th Century Literature

I work on American 20th century literature, mainly specializing in the fields of Jewish American prose, 1930s urban fiction, American popular culture, graphic novels and Holocaust Studies. My publications include a monograph on Bernard Malamud’s oeuvre (Ethnic Identities in Bernard Malamud's Fiction, 2000), articles on the works of Malamud, Henry Roth, Clifford Odets, and Tillie Olsen and other 1930s writers.

From 2010 to 2013 my research focused on Art Spiegelman's Maus, where I addressed issues of translatability and the relational nature of grapho-textual representational strategies, and on his post 9/11 work In the Shadow of No Towers.

Current Research

My recent research, within translation studies, includes the article "Between Transmission and Translation: The Rearticulation of Vladek Spiegelman's Languages in Maus" (Translation and Literature, 24:1, Spring 2015) and the book chapter "Fixing Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer through Translation: From El Hombre de Kiev (1967) to El Reparador (2011)" in Bernard Malamud: A Centennial Tribute (Wayne State UP, 2016).

In early 2017, I had the honour of contributing a chapter to The Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow, with the title "Race and Cultural Politics in Bellow's Fiction" (chapter 10; pp. 120-133). More recently, I have published work on the significance of spaces and sites in Edward Dahlberg's early autobiographical novels, pursuing a novel approach to this somewhat obscure American Jewish writer.