Hana Wirth-Nesher
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195134681
- eISBN:
- 9780199848652
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195134681.003.0027
- Subject:
- History, History of Religion
A review of the book, Philip Roth and the Jews by Alan Cooper is presented. Cooper tells an engaging story of a pioneering, courageous, prophetic hero — the writer Philip Roth — doomed to be ...
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A review of the book, Philip Roth and the Jews by Alan Cooper is presented. Cooper tells an engaging story of a pioneering, courageous, prophetic hero — the writer Philip Roth — doomed to be misunderstood by his readers. Whereas Cooper's admiration, bordering on reverence, for Roth is endearing, his analyses are occasionally marred by this defensive posture. This book is largely a history of the reception of Roth's work, interspersed with summaries and interpretations of the novels as they enter into a dialogue with readers and critics. Its intention is clear: to vindicate Roth, to make a case for him not only as a moralist, but as a writer seriously wrestling with Jewish identity and contemporary Jewish civilization.Less
A review of the book, Philip Roth and the Jews by Alan Cooper is presented. Cooper tells an engaging story of a pioneering, courageous, prophetic hero — the writer Philip Roth — doomed to be misunderstood by his readers. Whereas Cooper's admiration, bordering on reverence, for Roth is endearing, his analyses are occasionally marred by this defensive posture. This book is largely a history of the reception of Roth's work, interspersed with summaries and interpretations of the novels as they enter into a dialogue with readers and critics. Its intention is clear: to vindicate Roth, to make a case for him not only as a moralist, but as a writer seriously wrestling with Jewish identity and contemporary Jewish civilization.
Andrew Bennett
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074875
- eISBN:
- 9781781702420
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074875.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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
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.
David Brauner
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074240
- eISBN:
- 9781781700938
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074240.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Philip Roth has been both lauded and criticised for what John McDaniel (in the first monograph on Roth, published in 1974) calls his ‘commitment to social realism’. According to McDaniel, Roth's ...
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Philip Roth has been both lauded and criticised for what John McDaniel (in the first monograph on Roth, published in 1974) calls his ‘commitment to social realism’. According to McDaniel, Roth's realism is part of a moral vision that indicates ‘an abiding respect for life’. This chapter considers some of the ways in which Roth's generic experimentation, which can be traced from his early novel My Life as a Man (1974), through The Counterlife (1986), The Facts (1988), Deception (1990) and Operation Shylock (1993), appropriates, complicates and finally parodies aspects of both realism and postmodernism, making connections between these texts and works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Pynchon, Tim O'Brien and Bret Easton Ellis.Less
Philip Roth has been both lauded and criticised for what John McDaniel (in the first monograph on Roth, published in 1974) calls his ‘commitment to social realism’. According to McDaniel, Roth's realism is part of a moral vision that indicates ‘an abiding respect for life’. This chapter considers some of the ways in which Roth's generic experimentation, which can be traced from his early novel My Life as a Man (1974), through The Counterlife (1986), The Facts (1988), Deception (1990) and Operation Shylock (1993), appropriates, complicates and finally parodies aspects of both realism and postmodernism, making connections between these texts and works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Pynchon, Tim O'Brien and Bret Easton Ellis.
Ezra Mendelsohn
- Published in print:
- 1997
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195112030
- eISBN:
- 9780199854608
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195112030.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, History of Religion
This chapter discusses Philip Roth's addition to the growing chorus of “diasporists” in the academy and the arts. In his novel Operation Shylock: A Confession, Roth made a cultural statement that not ...
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This chapter discusses Philip Roth's addition to the growing chorus of “diasporists” in the academy and the arts. In his novel Operation Shylock: A Confession, Roth made a cultural statement that not only finds value in recuperating discarded or defunct models, like crinolines crumbling in an old attic trunk, it is part of a postmodern search for value in the interstices, in the outskirts and peripheries of sacred centers and in the imagination of alternative worlds. The book is a narrative fiction whose conventional mandate and popular appeal lie in its potential for entertainment or edification, its main achievement lies in enacting some of the more ludicrous or lurid dimensions of a larger cultural agenda.Less
This chapter discusses Philip Roth's addition to the growing chorus of “diasporists” in the academy and the arts. In his novel Operation Shylock: A Confession, Roth made a cultural statement that not only finds value in recuperating discarded or defunct models, like crinolines crumbling in an old attic trunk, it is part of a postmodern search for value in the interstices, in the outskirts and peripheries of sacred centers and in the imagination of alternative worlds. The book is a narrative fiction whose conventional mandate and popular appeal lie in its potential for entertainment or edification, its main achievement lies in enacting some of the more ludicrous or lurid dimensions of a larger cultural agenda.
David Brauner
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074240
- eISBN:
- 9781781700938
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074240.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
The publication of The Plot Against America (2004) was attended with more fanfare and controversy than any of Philip Roth's books since Portnoy's Complaint (1969). Just as Portnoy had been heralded ...
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The publication of The Plot Against America (2004) was attended with more fanfare and controversy than any of Philip Roth's books since Portnoy's Complaint (1969). Just as Portnoy had been heralded as the publishing event of 1969 long before its actual appearance, so The Plot Against America was trailed by a carefully orchestrated marketing campaign which exploited rumours that the novel's title alluded to the events of 9/11 and which included the dissemination of extracts from the book prior to its publication. In spite of Roth's own repeated denials that the book was intended as an oblique or symbolic commentary on George W. Bush's ‘war against terror’, many early reviewers read the novel as, and many readers bought the book anticipating, a political allegory. This chapter looks at The Plot Against America alongside Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) as studies of the relationship between history and fiction, trauma and imagination. So many reviewers couched their critiques in terms of the realism, or otherwise, of Roth's and Foer's novels.Less
The publication of The Plot Against America (2004) was attended with more fanfare and controversy than any of Philip Roth's books since Portnoy's Complaint (1969). Just as Portnoy had been heralded as the publishing event of 1969 long before its actual appearance, so The Plot Against America was trailed by a carefully orchestrated marketing campaign which exploited rumours that the novel's title alluded to the events of 9/11 and which included the dissemination of extracts from the book prior to its publication. In spite of Roth's own repeated denials that the book was intended as an oblique or symbolic commentary on George W. Bush's ‘war against terror’, many early reviewers read the novel as, and many readers bought the book anticipating, a political allegory. This chapter looks at The Plot Against America alongside Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) as studies of the relationship between history and fiction, trauma and imagination. So many reviewers couched their critiques in terms of the realism, or otherwise, of Roth's and Foer's novels.
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804781824
- eISBN:
- 9780804783675
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804781824.003.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Jewish Studies
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 ...
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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
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.
Paul Giles
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691136134
- eISBN:
- 9781400836512
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691136134.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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
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.
Michael T. Gilmore
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195157765
- eISBN:
- 9780199787784
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195157765.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
David Brauner
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074240
- eISBN:
- 9781781700938
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074240.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This book offers an overview of the career of Philip Roth, with particular emphasis on his later work, and an assessment of his contribution to contemporary American fiction. Rather than attempting ...
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This book offers an overview of the career of Philip Roth, with particular emphasis on his later work, and an assessment of his contribution to contemporary American fiction. Rather than attempting to survey all of Roth's work, it concentrates on the second half of his career, from the publication of The Ghost Writer (1979) to The Plot Against America (2004). The book considers some of the ways in which Roth's generic experimentation appropriates, complicates and finally parodies aspects of both realism and postmodernism, making connections between these texts and works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Pynchon, Tim O'Brien and Bret Easton Ellis. Moreover, it discusses Roth's treatment of morality, mortality and masculinity in what it considers to be his masterpiece, Sabbath's Theater (1995), comparing it with a short story by Stanley Elkin and a novel by Howard Jacobson that share many of its themes.Less
This book offers an overview of the career of Philip Roth, with particular emphasis on his later work, and an assessment of his contribution to contemporary American fiction. Rather than attempting to survey all of Roth's work, it concentrates on the second half of his career, from the publication of The Ghost Writer (1979) to The Plot Against America (2004). The book considers some of the ways in which Roth's generic experimentation appropriates, complicates and finally parodies aspects of both realism and postmodernism, making connections between these texts and works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Pynchon, Tim O'Brien and Bret Easton Ellis. Moreover, it discusses Roth's treatment of morality, mortality and masculinity in what it considers to be his masterpiece, Sabbath's Theater (1995), comparing it with a short story by Stanley Elkin and a novel by Howard Jacobson that share many of its themes.
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804781824
- eISBN:
- 9780804783675
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804781824.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Jewish Studies
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 ...
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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
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.
Ezra Mendelsohn (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 1997
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195112030
- eISBN:
- 9780199854608
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195112030.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Religion
This volume collects chapters on Jewish literature which deal with “the manifold ways that literary texts reveal their authors' attitudes toward their own Jewish identity and toward diverse aspects ...
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This volume collects chapters on Jewish literature which deal with “the manifold ways that literary texts reveal their authors' attitudes toward their own Jewish identity and toward diverse aspects of the “Jewish question.”” Chapters in this volume explore the tension between Israeli and Diaspora identities, and between those who write in Hebrew or Yiddish and those who write in other “non-Jewish” languages. The chapters also explore the question of how Jewish writers remember history in their “search for a useable past.” From chapters on Jabotinsky's virtually unknown plays to Philip Roth's novels, this book provides a strong overview of contemporary themes in Jewish literary studies.Less
This volume collects chapters on Jewish literature which deal with “the manifold ways that literary texts reveal their authors' attitudes toward their own Jewish identity and toward diverse aspects of the “Jewish question.”” Chapters in this volume explore the tension between Israeli and Diaspora identities, and between those who write in Hebrew or Yiddish and those who write in other “non-Jewish” languages. The chapters also explore the question of how Jewish writers remember history in their “search for a useable past.” From chapters on Jabotinsky's virtually unknown plays to Philip Roth's novels, this book provides a strong overview of contemporary themes in Jewish literary studies.
Stephen Schryer
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781503603677
- eISBN:
- 9781503606081
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9781503603677.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
David Brauner
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074240
- eISBN:
- 9781781700938
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074240.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Trials are ubiquitous in the fiction of Philip Roth. From Peter Tarnopol's lengthy divorce litigation in My Life as a Man (1974) to the historical court case of John Demjanjuk that dominates the ...
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Trials are ubiquitous in the fiction of Philip Roth. From Peter Tarnopol's lengthy divorce litigation in My Life as a Man (1974) to the historical court case of John Demjanjuk that dominates the opening of Operation Shylock (1993), the trial is one of Roth's favourite tropes. This chapter argues that the four books which comprise the Zuckerman Bound series – The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983) and The Prague Orgy (1985) – represent a detailed exploration of the ethical and aesthetic conflicts faced by Roth. Focusing on Roth's use of legalistic language in these fictions, it suggests that the trials (the tests and ordeals) which Nathan Zuckerman (the protagonist of all four books) undergoes not only reflect Roth's paradoxical responses to the critical reception of his earlier work by Jewish readers but also function as metaphors for the ways in which, historically, Jews have often judged, and been judged, by themselves and others.Less
Trials are ubiquitous in the fiction of Philip Roth. From Peter Tarnopol's lengthy divorce litigation in My Life as a Man (1974) to the historical court case of John Demjanjuk that dominates the opening of Operation Shylock (1993), the trial is one of Roth's favourite tropes. This chapter argues that the four books which comprise the Zuckerman Bound series – The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983) and The Prague Orgy (1985) – represent a detailed exploration of the ethical and aesthetic conflicts faced by Roth. Focusing on Roth's use of legalistic language in these fictions, it suggests that the trials (the tests and ordeals) which Nathan Zuckerman (the protagonist of all four books) undergoes not only reflect Roth's paradoxical responses to the critical reception of his earlier work by Jewish readers but also function as metaphors for the ways in which, historically, Jews have often judged, and been judged, by themselves and others.
Bharat Tandon
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780748682492
- eISBN:
- 9781474422109
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748682492.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Christopher Douglas
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781501702112
- eISBN:
- 9781501703539
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501702112.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
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 ...
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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
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.”
Mary Esteve
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231156172
- eISBN:
- 9780231520775
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231156172.003.0015
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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.” ...
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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
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.
Patrick Hayes
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199689125
- eISBN:
- 9780191795305
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199689125.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Philip Roth is widely acknowledged as one of the defining authors in the literature of post-war America. Yet he has long been a polarising figure, and throughout his career he has won the disapproval ...
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Philip Roth is widely acknowledged as one of the defining authors in the literature of post-war America. Yet he has long been a polarising figure, and throughout his career he has won the disapproval of an extremely diverse range of public moralists – including, it would seem, the Nobel Prize committee. Far from seeking to make Roth a more palatable writer, this book argues that his interest in transgressing the “virtue racket”, as one of his characters put it, defines his importance. Placing the unruliness of human passions at the heart of his writing, Roth is the most subtle exponent of a line of thinking that descends from Nietzsche, and which values the arts for their capacity to scrutinise life in an extra-moral way. This book explores the depth and richness of insight that Roth’s fiction thereby generates, and defines what is at stake in his challenge to widely-held assumptions about the ethical value of literature. As well as examining how Roth emerged as a writer and his main lines of influence, it considers his impact on questions about the nature and value of tragedy, the relevance of art to life, the relationship between art and the unconscious, the idea of a literary canon, and how fiction can illuminate America’s complex post-war history.Less
Philip Roth is widely acknowledged as one of the defining authors in the literature of post-war America. Yet he has long been a polarising figure, and throughout his career he has won the disapproval of an extremely diverse range of public moralists – including, it would seem, the Nobel Prize committee. Far from seeking to make Roth a more palatable writer, this book argues that his interest in transgressing the “virtue racket”, as one of his characters put it, defines his importance. Placing the unruliness of human passions at the heart of his writing, Roth is the most subtle exponent of a line of thinking that descends from Nietzsche, and which values the arts for their capacity to scrutinise life in an extra-moral way. This book explores the depth and richness of insight that Roth’s fiction thereby generates, and defines what is at stake in his challenge to widely-held assumptions about the ethical value of literature. As well as examining how Roth emerged as a writer and his main lines of influence, it considers his impact on questions about the nature and value of tragedy, the relevance of art to life, the relationship between art and the unconscious, the idea of a literary canon, and how fiction can illuminate America’s complex post-war history.
David Brauner
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074240
- eISBN:
- 9781781700938
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074240.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
In an ‘interview with [him]self’ on The Great American Novel in 1973 (reprinted in Reading Myself and Others), Philip Roth recalls how he came upon a letter from Herman Melville to Nathaniel ...
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In an ‘interview with [him]self’ on The Great American Novel in 1973 (reprinted in Reading Myself and Others), Philip Roth recalls how he came upon a letter from Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, in which Melville describes his elation upon completing Moby Dick. In a feature on Roth published on the eve of the publication of Portnoy's Complaint, Albert Goldman traced the origins of the novel to the childhood larks of Roth and his peers. This chapter discusses Roth's treatment of morality, mortality and masculinity in what it considers to be his masterpiece, Sabbath's Theater (1995), comparing it with a short story by Stanley Elkin and a novel by Howard Jacobson that share many of its themes.Less
In an ‘interview with [him]self’ on The Great American Novel in 1973 (reprinted in Reading Myself and Others), Philip Roth recalls how he came upon a letter from Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, in which Melville describes his elation upon completing Moby Dick. In a feature on Roth published on the eve of the publication of Portnoy's Complaint, Albert Goldman traced the origins of the novel to the childhood larks of Roth and his peers. This chapter discusses Roth's treatment of morality, mortality and masculinity in what it considers to be his masterpiece, Sabbath's Theater (1995), comparing it with a short story by Stanley Elkin and a novel by Howard Jacobson that share many of its themes.
David Brauner
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074240
- eISBN:
- 9781781700938
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074240.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Philip Roth's fiction has always been characterised by the tension between the individual capacity for self-determination and the deterministic forces of history; between seductive dreams of harmony, ...
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Philip Roth's fiction has always been characterised by the tension between the individual capacity for self-determination and the deterministic forces of history; between seductive dreams of harmony, idealism, and purity and the troubling realities of discord, disillusionment and corruption; between the desire to exert control, impose order, and explain, and the impulse to break free from all constraints; to revel in anarchy, chaos and disorder; and to celebrate the indeterminate, the unknowable and the inexplicable. Nowhere are these tensions more clearly articulated than in what has become known as his ‘American Trilogy’ of novels: American Pastoral (1997), I Married A Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000). This chapter explores Roth's use of what it calls the ‘anti-pastoral’ mode in his ‘American Trilogy’ of novels. It applies the term ‘nature anxiety’ metaphorically to define Roth's deconstruction of the Utopian dreams and rituals of purification with which many of the characters in the American Triology delude themselves and deceive others.Less
Philip Roth's fiction has always been characterised by the tension between the individual capacity for self-determination and the deterministic forces of history; between seductive dreams of harmony, idealism, and purity and the troubling realities of discord, disillusionment and corruption; between the desire to exert control, impose order, and explain, and the impulse to break free from all constraints; to revel in anarchy, chaos and disorder; and to celebrate the indeterminate, the unknowable and the inexplicable. Nowhere are these tensions more clearly articulated than in what has become known as his ‘American Trilogy’ of novels: American Pastoral (1997), I Married A Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000). This chapter explores Roth's use of what it calls the ‘anti-pastoral’ mode in his ‘American Trilogy’ of novels. It applies the term ‘nature anxiety’ metaphorically to define Roth's deconstruction of the Utopian dreams and rituals of purification with which many of the characters in the American Triology delude themselves and deceive others.
Michael Kimmage
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804781824
- eISBN:
- 9780804783675
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804781824.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Jewish Studies
This book concentrates on the literature of Philip Roth, one of America's greatest writers, and in particular on American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain. Each of these novels ...
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This book concentrates on the literature of Philip Roth, one of America's greatest writers, and in particular on American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain. Each of these novels from the 1990s uses Newark, New Jersey, to explore American history and character. Each features a protagonist who grows up in and then leaves Newark, after which he is undone by a historically generated crisis. The city's twentieth-century decline from immigrant metropolis to postindustrial disaster completes the motif of history and its terrifying power over individual destiny. This book is the first critical study to foreground the city of Newark as the source of Roth's inspiration, and to scrutinize a subject Roth was accused of avoiding as a younger writer—history. In so doing, the book brings together the two halves of Roth's decades-long career: the first featuring characters who live outside of history's grip; the second, characters entrapped in historical patterns beyond their ken and control.Less
This book concentrates on the literature of Philip Roth, one of America's greatest writers, and in particular on American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain. Each of these novels from the 1990s uses Newark, New Jersey, to explore American history and character. Each features a protagonist who grows up in and then leaves Newark, after which he is undone by a historically generated crisis. The city's twentieth-century decline from immigrant metropolis to postindustrial disaster completes the motif of history and its terrifying power over individual destiny. This book is the first critical study to foreground the city of Newark as the source of Roth's inspiration, and to scrutinize a subject Roth was accused of avoiding as a younger writer—history. In so doing, the book brings together the two halves of Roth's decades-long career: the first featuring characters who live outside of history's grip; the second, characters entrapped in historical patterns beyond their ken and control.
