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American ignorance: Philip Roth’s American trilogy

Andrew Bennett

in Ignorance: Literature and Agnoiology

This chapter explores the work of Philip Roth, who is considered as one of America's top modern novelists, in order to focus on the question of authorial ignorance, suggesting that it is basically a ... More

This chapter explores the work of Philip Roth, who is considered as one of America's top modern novelists, in order to focus on the question of authorial ignorance, suggesting that it is basically a part of the force of literature that modern writers engage with whenever they describe themselves as not knowing or ignorant. It supposes that authorial ignorance is a crucial yet often overlooked concern within modern literary practice. The chapter also looks at the ways Roth is consistently concerned with the question of the nature of authorship and its ethical relation with ignorance.Less

Introduction

in In History's Grip: Philip Roth's Newark Trilogy

Newark is a small city in New Jersey, a sad, unwelcoming place with a sinister aura, with a meager skyline that stands in stark contrast to a vast expanse of crumbling buildings, streets, and ... More

Newark is a small city in New Jersey, a sad, unwelcoming place with a sinister aura, with a meager skyline that stands in stark contrast to a vast expanse of crumbling buildings, streets, and neighborhoods. Yet Newark occupies a place in American history, whether we talk about the War of 1812, the Civil War, industrialization, mass immigration, the rioting and unrest that took place in the late 1960s, or the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. It is also the setting for Philip Roth's fiction, including his three novels, sometimes called the American trilogy but more accurately can be called the Newark trilogy: American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000). Roth, who grew up in Newark, uses it as a vehicle for exploring American character in conjunction with American history. In the Newark trilogy, he re-creates the history of Newark on a grand scale and makes such history interchangeable with the city.Less

Race/Erasure: Douglass to Roth

Michael T. Gilmore

in Surface and Depth: The Quest for Legibility in American Culture

This chapter focuses on the American dilemma of race, exploring the rise of a literary countertradition that privileges silence and dissimulation over candor and accessibility. Examples are Frederick ... More

This chapter focuses on the American dilemma of race, exploring the rise of a literary countertradition that privileges silence and dissimulation over candor and accessibility. Examples are Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. It is shown how racial others become associated with illegibility in these texts, the corollary to a culture that relegates Black people to the margins.Less

Conclusion; or, Kafka in Newark

in In History's Grip: Philip Roth's Newark Trilogy

Born in 1883, Franz Kafka was a historical figure whose Prague was occupied by the Nazis and then the Soviets. A Jew who lived mostly in Prague and wrote in German, Kafka describes the prison-house ... More

Born in 1883, Franz Kafka was a historical figure whose Prague was occupied by the Nazis and then the Soviets. A Jew who lived mostly in Prague and wrote in German, Kafka describes the prison-house of modernity, of modern politics, of totalitarianism before the fact, and of modern Jewish life. He tackles the plight of an emancipated, assimilated Jewry that suffered from anti-Semitism as well as the plight of a great writer living as a non-Christian in a Christian world. As one who walks hand in hand with history, Kafka figures prominently in one of Philip Roth's most engaging literary jokes where he is taken to Newark: the short story-essay “I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting'; or, Looking at Kafka,” published in 1973. In the period between Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and The Human Stain (2000), Roth has seen how the distance between his America and Kafka's Europe, between Newark and Prague, has progressively narrowed.Less

Suburb, Network, Homeland: National Space and the Rhetoric of Broadcasting

Paul Giles

in The Global Remapping of American Literature

This chapter examines how the landscape of American broadcasting in the second half of the twentieth century evolved from a situation in which values of liberal independence acted as a front for the ... More

This chapter examines how the landscape of American broadcasting in the second half of the twentieth century evolved from a situation in which values of liberal independence acted as a front for the sway of network corporations to one in which the incremental fragmentation of the increasingly global media market posed a challenge to the rhetoric of national space. It considers how the spatial dynamics inherent within American culture have been represented in American writers such as Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and Don DeLillo, and contrasts this with the perspectives of a younger generation, in particular those of David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers. It explains how the “Voice of America” (VOA), the official radio and television service of the U.S. federal government, became “the nation's ideological arm of anti-communism,” while the minds of supposedly free-thinking citizens at home were also shaped surreptitiously by the new power of electronic media.Less

Who Belongs in the University?

Stephen Schryer

in Maximum Feasible Participation: American Literature and the War on Poverty

This chapter focuses on Philip Roth’s late 1990s novel, The Human Stain, arguing that the novel draws an analogy between the university and the Democratic Party. In early War on Poverty–era novels ... More

This chapter focuses on Philip Roth’s late 1990s novel, The Human Stain, arguing that the novel draws an analogy between the university and the Democratic Party. In early War on Poverty–era novels like Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth developed an antiprocess conception of art and welfare politics, one that conceived of works of art and public institutions as products that require audiences to appreciate them on their own terms. In The Human Stain, Roth extends this conception to the postmodern academy, using it to criticize multicultural education and affirmative action. Linking the university and New Deal liberal coalition, Roth insists that both are under assault by cultural and ideological outsiders. This analogy leads Roth to embrace a strategic conservatism, one that echoes the politics of Bill Clinton, whose impeachment trial recurs throughout The Human Stain.Less

Philip Roth’s Kinds of Writing

Bharat Tandon

in Writing for The New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical

This chapter explores The New Yorker's distinctive relationship with the Manhattan cityscape within which it was conceived and produced. It suggests ways in which both the magazine's treatments of ... More

This chapter explores The New Yorker's distinctive relationship with the Manhattan cityscape within which it was conceived and produced. It suggests ways in which both the magazine's treatments of the value of readable social indicators, and the larger cultural cachet of the magazine itself in the 1950s and 1960s, offered the young Philip Roth an early engagement with ideas that were to become defining imaginative preoccupations across his fictional and critical oeuvre, from Goodbye, Columbus to Nemesis. The chapter shows how there remains an important difference between textual cityscapes and Times Square in the middle of the twentieth century. Reading a nineteenth-century poster or a handbill may have been fascinating or disorientating to a passerby, but for the most part, the implicit power relationship of conventional reading would not have been challenged.Less

Postwar Pastoral: The Art of Happiness in Philip Roth

Mary Esteve

in American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions

This chapter examines the fiction of Philip Roth and finds within it a nuanced account of “the relation between aesthetic value or quality and that paradigmatic postwar American feeling, happiness.” ... More

This chapter examines the fiction of Philip Roth and finds within it a nuanced account of “the relation between aesthetic value or quality and that paradigmatic postwar American feeling, happiness.” It brings to bear a theory that involves a range of social commentators and sociological analysts from the middle of the twentieth century (Howard Mumford Jones, C. Wright Mills, David Riesman, Lionel Trilling, Melvin Tumin, William Whyte) who collectively turned their attention to the question of post-World War II American society and its vaunted pursuit of happiness. They, like Roth, found this pursuit to be in large measure vulgar and materialistic, shallow and self-centered, and they sought to identify means of enabling authentic affective experience to flourish and superior aesthetic encounters to take place. The chapter culminates in an interpretation of the engagement in Goodbye, Columbus between a young librarian who finds a way to make the library, as a particular institutional piece of a social structure, serve the affective and aesthetic needs of a black boy for whom a book of arts prints is an indescribably valuable inspiration.Less

Recapitulation and Religious Indifference in The Plot Against America

Christopher Douglas

in If God Meant to Interfere: American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right

This chapter argues that Philip Roth's The Plot Against America is critical to the hugely important conservative Christian resurgence of the last four decades. Like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's ... More

This chapter argues that Philip Roth's The Plot Against America is critical to the hugely important conservative Christian resurgence of the last four decades. Like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale—a fictional thought experiment—Roth's novel was based on things that had “already happened.” It revisits the racialism of his understanding of the Nazis to repudiate it and recapitulate the history of the multicultural turn. But it is this very method that blinds Roth to the reenergized religious dimensions of the contemporary scene. In one of the most important critical debates about the novel to date, for example, Walter Benn Michaels argued that the act of writing an antiracist book in 2004 was part of the neoliberal project of “redescrib[ing] the injustice of class difference as a kind of discrimination.”Less

Operation Shylock

Kenneth Gross

in Shylock Is Shakespeare

This chapter focuses on Philip Roth's 1993 novel Operation Shylock: A Confession, which takes place mostly in and around Jerusalem at the time of the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada, in 1988. ... More

This chapter focuses on Philip Roth's 1993 novel Operation Shylock: A Confession, which takes place mostly in and around Jerusalem at the time of the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada, in 1988. The story it tells seems to have little to do with Shakespeare's fable about a Venetian merchant and a Jewish moneylender. Shylock is indeed taken up explicitly only once, in a speech by a man who calls himself David Supposnik, an Israeli secret policeman disguised as an antiquarian book dealer. But despite the absence of more detailed references to Shakespeare's play, one senses throughout the novel Roth's wrestling match with Shylock. Through wild and oblique mirrors, Roth explores the nature of Shylock's voice, its disturbing inventiveness, its gleeful and self-wounding powers of rage; we hear at moments the very cadences of Shylock's speeches, his genius for repetition and accumulating grievance. The book touches on the power we feel in Shylock to engage his own status as an object of loathing, on how this disfigures and deludes him, and on how it is fed by larger systems of paranoia, lying, and forgery.Less