Pub Date : 2019-09-17DOI: 10.5703/philrothstud.15.2.0066
K. Whitehead
ABSTRACT:Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000) intricately weaves together collective past alongside individual present, developing a cohesive understanding of trauma in the American identity. This paper draws on an interdisciplinary methodology informed by trauma theory in order to argue that The Human Stain is as invested in the individual history of Coleman Silk as it is in the collective trauma of the United States.
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Pub Date : 2019-09-17DOI: 10.5703/philrothstud.15.2.0005
Andy Connolly
ABSTRACT:By looking at how Roth's relevance as a writer of historical fiction has assumed new significance in recent discussions of The Plot Against America (2004) as a novel that helps to shed light on the "unforeseen" rise to power of Donald Trump, this discussion offers certain warnings about the abuses of an historicist criticism that seeks to assign polemical value to Roth's work. In so doing, this article examines the concerns dramatized in Exit Ghost (2007) about issues of posthumous legacy and contextual criticism as an avenue for speculating upon the possibilities for reading Roth within an historical light and claims that it is mistaken for readers to think of the author as one who holds fast to particular ideological positions or political loyalties. At the same time, it looks at how Roth's strained sense of loyalty to literary formalism, as articulated in his non-fiction, leaves room for sophisticated strategies of contextual criticism that avoid the kind of didactic moral and political readings that the author had always forsworn.
{"title":"Posthumous Roth: Reflections on the Dilemmas of Historicizing Philip Roth's Fiction","authors":"Andy Connolly","doi":"10.5703/philrothstud.15.2.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5703/philrothstud.15.2.0005","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:By looking at how Roth's relevance as a writer of historical fiction has assumed new significance in recent discussions of The Plot Against America (2004) as a novel that helps to shed light on the \"unforeseen\" rise to power of Donald Trump, this discussion offers certain warnings about the abuses of an historicist criticism that seeks to assign polemical value to Roth's work. In so doing, this article examines the concerns dramatized in Exit Ghost (2007) about issues of posthumous legacy and contextual criticism as an avenue for speculating upon the possibilities for reading Roth within an historical light and claims that it is mistaken for readers to think of the author as one who holds fast to particular ideological positions or political loyalties. At the same time, it looks at how Roth's strained sense of loyalty to literary formalism, as articulated in his non-fiction, leaves room for sophisticated strategies of contextual criticism that avoid the kind of didactic moral and political readings that the author had always forsworn.","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43114601","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-17DOI: 10.5703/philrothstud.15.2.0024
Aaron Kreuter
ABSTRACT:This essay offers a close reading of the missing final chapter in Philip Roth's 1993 novel Operation Shylock. Reading the novel through my concept of diasporic heteroglossia, a combination of Bakthinian theory and the diaspora ethics of Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin, I argue that Roth thoroughly and energetically dismantles the Zionist narrative of Israel as the redemption of the Jewish diaspora, as the end of Jewish history, and as an innocent, unimpeachable state that now has the power to speak for—and act on behalf of—the entirety of the Jewish people. When Philip the narrator—as opposed to Roth the author—decides to withhold the eleventh chapter, which supposedly details his spywork on Palestinian activists and anti-Zionist Jews in Athens, he not only concedes to the demands of Smiles-burger, the elderly Mossad agent who instructed him to suppress the chapter, but his actions also reveal the dangers of holding up ethnic nationalism, in this case Zionism, at the expense of other kinds of belonging, such as the diasporic. For a text brimming over with voice, story, and argument, the fact that Philip's adventures in Athens and elsewhere are the only narrative element that is shut out of the novel deserves more than passing attention. The shocking moment of self-censorship that ends the novel reveals Roth's commitment in Operation Shylock to exposing the distorted worldview that is required in order for Jewish Americans to continue supporting the self-proclaimed Jewish state.
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Pub Date : 2019-09-17DOI: 10.5703/philrothstud.15.2.0115
Brittany Hirth
{"title":"Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2018","authors":"Brittany Hirth","doi":"10.5703/philrothstud.15.2.0115","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5703/philrothstud.15.2.0115","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44616477","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-05-25DOI: 10.5703/PHILROTHSTUD.15.1.0033
Ann Basu
Philip Roth intrigued, provoked, amused, and absorbed his readers for more than fifty years. Challenging and delighting us, his novels have generated an intellectual response from writers and scholars that has created one of the most vibrant literary fields in modern literary criticism. Roth declared that he would write no more fiction after Nemesis, published in 2010. Now he is gone, and we can only await his official biography written by Blake Bailey and continue to speak amongst ourselves about his great literary legacy. Roth was an American to his core. His Jewish family and upbringing shaped his vision of a nation whose culture he never stopped exploring and whose flaws he dissected in ever more powerful ways. The nature of Roth’s contribution to his national culture is perhaps best expressed in Roth’s conversation with Primo Levi in 1986, when Roth asks Levi to explain “the tension between your rootedness and your impurity” as a Jew and an Italian. Levi returns:
{"title":"Remembering Roth: The Sharp Mustard Flavor of The Human Stain","authors":"Ann Basu","doi":"10.5703/PHILROTHSTUD.15.1.0033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5703/PHILROTHSTUD.15.1.0033","url":null,"abstract":"Philip Roth intrigued, provoked, amused, and absorbed his readers for more than fifty years. Challenging and delighting us, his novels have generated an intellectual response from writers and scholars that has created one of the most vibrant literary fields in modern literary criticism. Roth declared that he would write no more fiction after Nemesis, published in 2010. Now he is gone, and we can only await his official biography written by Blake Bailey and continue to speak amongst ourselves about his great literary legacy. Roth was an American to his core. His Jewish family and upbringing shaped his vision of a nation whose culture he never stopped exploring and whose flaws he dissected in ever more powerful ways. The nature of Roth’s contribution to his national culture is perhaps best expressed in Roth’s conversation with Primo Levi in 1986, when Roth asks Levi to explain “the tension between your rootedness and your impurity” as a Jew and an Italian. Levi returns:","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70915028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-05-25DOI: 10.5703/PHILROTHSTUD.15.1.0053
David Gooblar
I spent the second half of my twenties writing a book on Philip Roth. The book, which began as my PhD dissertation, was a study of Roth’s literary career, from its beginnings in the late fifties up to the end of the twentieth century. Of course, Roth’s career did not end at the end of the twentieth century. In fact, as I wrote my study, Roth kept writing, too. When I began in late 2003, he had published twenty-five books. By the time my book came out in 2011, that number had swelled to thirty-one. My subject wouldn’t keep still. So I needed to draw lines, to limit the project’s scope in some way. The turn of the century seemed a good endpoint: both for the round number, and for the growing sense that Roth’s “American Trilogy,” which culminated with 2000’s The Human Stain, would be the defining achievement of Roth’s latecareer resurgence. I couldn’t have an open-ended study, expanding every time Roth published a new work. So, with the blessing of Kasia Boddy, my exceedingly wise PhD supervisor, I planned out a study of Roth’s fiction, beginning with Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and concluding with The Human Stain. I could always briefly touch on the twenty-first-century work in the conclusion. But even within those defined limits, I couldn’t write about everything. Forty-one years in a career as productive as Roth’s was more than a single dissertation could comprehensively cover. Writing is selection; the choices I would make about what books to cover would make a statement about their significance. In crafting the book’s focus, especially after I decided to title the book The Major Phases of Philip Roth, I was making an argument. Here are the peaks of Roth’s career, the books that make the biggest contribution to literary history, the books that are in some way representative of his entire achievement.
我二十几岁的后半生写了一本关于菲利普·罗斯的书。这本书最初是作为我的博士论文而写的，它研究了罗斯从50年代末开始到20世纪末的文学生涯。当然，罗斯的职业生涯并没有在20世纪末结束。事实上，当我写我的研究报告时，罗斯也一直在写。当我在2003年底开始时，他已经出版了25本书。到2011年我的书出版时，这个数字已经膨胀到31个。我的主题不愿安静。所以我需要画一些线，以某种方式限制项目的范围。世纪之交似乎是一个很好的终点:无论是对整数来说，还是对越来越多的人来说，罗斯的“美国三部曲”(以2000年的《人类的污点》(The Human Stain)告终)将成为罗斯职业生涯后期复兴的决定性成就的感觉来说，都是如此。我不可能有一个开放式的研究，每次罗斯发表一篇新作品就扩大研究范围。因此，在我极其聪明的博士导师卡西亚·博迪(Kasia Boddy)的祝福下，我计划研究罗斯的小说，从《再见，哥伦布》(1959)开始，到《人类的污点》(the Human Stain)结束。我总是可以在结束语中简要介绍一下21世纪的作品。但即使在这些限定的范围内，我也不能写出所有的东西。在罗斯这样富有成效的41年的职业生涯中，一篇论文是无法全面涵盖的。写作是选择;我所做的关于书的封面的选择可以说明它们的重要性。在构思这本书的重点时，尤其是在我决定把这本书命名为《菲利普·罗斯的主要阶段》之后，我提出了一个论点。以下是罗斯职业生涯的巅峰之作，这些书对文学史的贡献最大，在某种程度上代表了他的全部成就。
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Pub Date : 2019-05-25DOI: 10.5703/PHILROTHSTUD.15.1.0098
C. Morley
The brio, the punch, the vigor, and the rich, rude tang of Philip Roth’s writing have, of course, been well documented. In the innumerable news features after his death, critics, scholars, and friends reflected on the frenetic pace of his writing, as well as the humor, the vitriol, and the anger that informed his work. And surely not even the most skeptical reader can deny that Roth’s prose throbs with a uniquely caustic and savage energy, which, as his friend David Hare has observed, was directed towards skewering hypocrisy wherever he saw it. For me, though, the appeal of Roth’s writing lies not just in its vigor and energy, but in its depth, its sophistication, its moral and historical profundity. People often describe his books as angry, funny, sexy, or moving; but I think the lifeblood of Roth’s work is more than just an abiding wrath or lustiness. Rather it is his sustained engagement, throughout his career in fiction, with his ancestors, literary or otherwise. This energy manifests itself in two ways: in the raft of literary influences to which he was never shy of admitting, and in the various representations of characters who assess their lives in terms of those who have formed them.1 The first of these manifestations is nowhere more evident than in the book in which I first encountered Roth’s distinctive voice, I Married a Communist (1998). Contemplating his life and the friendships that have formed him, an older Nathan Zuckerman reflects:
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Pub Date : 2019-05-25DOI: 10.5703/philrothstud.15.1.0116
Timothy L. Parrish
Philip Roth is dead. Frankly, he’s been dead to me since 2009 when he stopped writing. Our relationship was always transactional. He was a writer and I was his reader, a faithful one, I insist. Each of his last five novels I read in one sitting the afternoon they were delivered to my house. Nonetheless, the official notification came as a shock. My wife broke it to me. Honey, she said, better give me your phone. You’re going to need to stay away from it for a few days. She apparently had noticed how these past several years I kept eyeballing it for the news flash announcing the title of his latest work. No one person copes with grief like any other. I’ve kept him as near as I can. My wife even gave her pillow over to Roth’s last book, Why Write? Likely she’s noticed me talking to it, though I have tried to whisper. The cover mesmerizes me. He doesn’t look like he knows he is dead. He looks a little pissed. His narrow eyes would scare me if I weren’t able to read his lips when they moved. Hey bub, can it really be I’m actually dead and cannot return but for your glance?! Between us, it’s always been the same story. Possession. It’s all Roth ever wants with readers. Alone in my study, and several times on park benches in cities I prefer not to recall, I’ve been possessed by him, repeatedly, as my hands fiercely cling to the bound object from which his face seems to take me in at a glance. Can such joy ever end? For the longest time, everything seemed so private. But for those aliases he used to draw me close—Zuckerman, Kepesh, the heroic self-conqueror, Alexander—it was just Roth and me. Even when I discerned in his shifting manner a vestige of James, a revenant that conjured Hawthorne, or the pleasant aroma of Proust, I knew it was clowning. Only Roth could hold me like that. Truly, I prayed that our intimacy never end. Why should it? We both wanted it that way? Don’t lose this good thing, he sometimes sang to me as I read, but something was always coming between us. Life, most obviously, though Roth insisted real life could only happen when I was reading him. I
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Pub Date : 2019-05-25DOI: 10.5703/PHILROTHSTUD.15.1.0135
D. Shostak
Halfway through a year I was devoting to writing a book about his work, Philip Roth appeared to me for the first time in a dream. He said little; in fact, he seemed interested only in talking to my husband rather than to me. He stayed on the fringes of the dream, looking sternly over at me once or twice, until the dream shifted away, as dreams do, and I was startled awake by the disappearance of my quarry. I was lying at my in-laws’ house on a sofa bed, a rather inadequate contraption that slopes lumpily upward from your feet to your head, so you feel as though you should be rising rather than sleeping, restless, and guilty for your sloth. It was a Christmas in Wisconsin without snow, so desperately wished for by my children, like the outline of a story where the plot hasn’t been filled in. That’s how my dream felt, too. Of course, I knew that it wasn’t Philip Roth in the dream, it was me, or so psychoanalytic wisdom tells me, since it was my dream and not the real world in which I very nearly met the man I was spending all my days thinking about. But if Philip Roth was me, then my husband must have been me, too, which confusingly means that I did get to speak to Roth, though really I was talking inaudibly to myself and never heard his side of the conversation. I didn’t meet Philip Roth in the dream, couldn’t fill in the outlines that my waking imagination could color in just so far. Had I done so, I would have betrayed the fraught work of imagining subjectivities that Roth spent a career exploring, perhaps best captured in that riveting paragraph in American Pastoral in which Zuckerman confesses that “The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again” (Pastoral 35). That, the writer admits, is the work of imaginative writing. It’s getting people wrong that is living. It’s also the work of imaginative reading. That’s what’s so vital about reading, getting people wrong in all those ways that are right for us, at the moment and from wherever we are sitting. The experience of a dream is like the experience of reading a book, where
{"title":"My Philip Roth","authors":"D. Shostak","doi":"10.5703/PHILROTHSTUD.15.1.0135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5703/PHILROTHSTUD.15.1.0135","url":null,"abstract":"Halfway through a year I was devoting to writing a book about his work, Philip Roth appeared to me for the first time in a dream. He said little; in fact, he seemed interested only in talking to my husband rather than to me. He stayed on the fringes of the dream, looking sternly over at me once or twice, until the dream shifted away, as dreams do, and I was startled awake by the disappearance of my quarry. I was lying at my in-laws’ house on a sofa bed, a rather inadequate contraption that slopes lumpily upward from your feet to your head, so you feel as though you should be rising rather than sleeping, restless, and guilty for your sloth. It was a Christmas in Wisconsin without snow, so desperately wished for by my children, like the outline of a story where the plot hasn’t been filled in. That’s how my dream felt, too. Of course, I knew that it wasn’t Philip Roth in the dream, it was me, or so psychoanalytic wisdom tells me, since it was my dream and not the real world in which I very nearly met the man I was spending all my days thinking about. But if Philip Roth was me, then my husband must have been me, too, which confusingly means that I did get to speak to Roth, though really I was talking inaudibly to myself and never heard his side of the conversation. I didn’t meet Philip Roth in the dream, couldn’t fill in the outlines that my waking imagination could color in just so far. Had I done so, I would have betrayed the fraught work of imagining subjectivities that Roth spent a career exploring, perhaps best captured in that riveting paragraph in American Pastoral in which Zuckerman confesses that “The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again” (Pastoral 35). That, the writer admits, is the work of imaginative writing. It’s getting people wrong that is living. It’s also the work of imaginative reading. That’s what’s so vital about reading, getting people wrong in all those ways that are right for us, at the moment and from wherever we are sitting. The experience of a dream is like the experience of reading a book, where","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44984113","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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