The Kugelmass Episode | Themes

The Kugelmass Episode Themes

Literature and Literary Study

One of the principal targets of Allen's satire in "The Kugelmass Episode" is literature and its study. Kugelmass is a humanities professor at the City College of New York in Brooklyn, but, it turns out, he "failed Freshman English." (Allen himself attended CCNY and failed English at New York University.) He doesn't speak like an educated man at all, but uses colloquialisms and a very New York Jewish speech pattern; the only time he deviates from this is to call his wife a "troglodyte" (a cave dweller) and to whisper sweet nothings into Emma Bovary's ear. Kugelmass is dissatisfied with his life, and he yearns not for love but for a cheap idealization or glamorization of it that is the stuff of romance novels. He decides he wants to have an affair with Emma Bovary because she is French—"that sounds to me perfect," he says. But what he doesn't even...
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