ABSTRACT:Quarrels, fights, battles, and disagreements often characterize much of the action in Roth’s writing. But an actual incident that nearly saw him come to blows with Norman Mailer occurred in the fall of 1972 when Roth defended Alan Lelchuk and a scene in his novel American Mischief (1973). The encounter occurred in a New York law office and was reported not only in the New York Times but on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. This essay outlines the causes, the pugilists, the referees, and the outcome, an incident where ego transcended literary value and anger competed with freedom of speech. The article also traces the long-standing, antagonistic nature of the Roth/Mailer association, which Roth continued in The Counter-life (1986) but partially softened in Exit Ghost (2007).
{"title":"Smackdown! Roth vs. Mailer","authors":"I. Nadel","doi":"10.1353/prs.2021.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/prs.2021.0003","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Quarrels, fights, battles, and disagreements often characterize much of the action in Roth’s writing. But an actual incident that nearly saw him come to blows with Norman Mailer occurred in the fall of 1972 when Roth defended Alan Lelchuk and a scene in his novel American Mischief (1973). The encounter occurred in a New York law office and was reported not only in the New York Times but on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. This essay outlines the causes, the pugilists, the referees, and the outcome, an incident where ego transcended literary value and anger competed with freedom of speech. The article also traces the long-standing, antagonistic nature of the Roth/Mailer association, which Roth continued in The Counter-life (1986) but partially softened in Exit Ghost (2007).","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46857364","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}
ABSTRACT:In Roth’s 2008 novel Indignation, two types of scandals are discernable: overtly presented sex acts in public spaces and subtly presented political scandals Marcus encounters first at his college and then while at war. The academic politics that Marcus experiences at Winesburg College, and the social oppression he battles as a result, illuminate the hypocrisy of the political rationale of the Korean War fought to quell the spread of Communism abroad, while quasi-fascist policies under McCarthyism were enacted within the country. The “sex scandals” emphasize that Marcus’s sexual dalliances are minor transgressions for which he is disproportionally punished with an expulsion that leads to his military draft. This punishment reveals the subtler but more significant scandal of the novel: Marcus’s purposeless death as a result of corrupt politics in the academic and political arenas. In his dying hours, Marcus cognitively pleas for a listener of his story who will understand the ultimate scandal of his life: his tragic death. This plea, when read through the lens of trauma theory, represents a call for more critical attention to the Korean War, as Indignation ultimately calls into question the morality of this “forgotten war.”
{"title":"Scandals and Battle Wounds: Remembering “The Forgotten War” in Indignation","authors":"Brittany Hirth","doi":"10.1353/prs.2021.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/prs.2021.0002","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:In Roth’s 2008 novel Indignation, two types of scandals are discernable: overtly presented sex acts in public spaces and subtly presented political scandals Marcus encounters first at his college and then while at war. The academic politics that Marcus experiences at Winesburg College, and the social oppression he battles as a result, illuminate the hypocrisy of the political rationale of the Korean War fought to quell the spread of Communism abroad, while quasi-fascist policies under McCarthyism were enacted within the country. The “sex scandals” emphasize that Marcus’s sexual dalliances are minor transgressions for which he is disproportionally punished with an expulsion that leads to his military draft. This punishment reveals the subtler but more significant scandal of the novel: Marcus’s purposeless death as a result of corrupt politics in the academic and political arenas. In his dying hours, Marcus cognitively pleas for a listener of his story who will understand the ultimate scandal of his life: his tragic death. This plea, when read through the lens of trauma theory, represents a call for more critical attention to the Korean War, as Indignation ultimately calls into question the morality of this “forgotten war.”","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44668625","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}
{"title":"Howard Jacobson by Howard Jacobson (review)","authors":"Joshua Lander","doi":"10.1353/prs.2021.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/prs.2021.0009","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46914864","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}
ABSTRACT:Literature and other media often depict older adults as lonely and isolated. Even when older adults are portrayed as part of a community-building process, agency tends to be assigned to younger characters. Through comparative close readings of Philip Roth’s Everyman (2006) and Lore Segal’s Half the Kingdom (2013), this article shows that other paths are possible. In these two novels—Segal’s more explicitly than Roth’s—the responsibility lies in the hands of older characters. They build communities while facing what they interpret to be external political forces that make the aging process more difficult than it needs to be.
{"title":"“Old Age is a Massacre”: Community Building in the Face of Political Disasters in Philip Roth’s Everyman and Lore Segal’s Half the Kingdom","authors":"David Hadar","doi":"10.1353/prs.2021.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/prs.2021.0007","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Literature and other media often depict older adults as lonely and isolated. Even when older adults are portrayed as part of a community-building process, agency tends to be assigned to younger characters. Through comparative close readings of Philip Roth’s Everyman (2006) and Lore Segal’s Half the Kingdom (2013), this article shows that other paths are possible. In these two novels—Segal’s more explicitly than Roth’s—the responsibility lies in the hands of older characters. They build communities while facing what they interpret to be external political forces that make the aging process more difficult than it needs to be.","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43133872","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}
ABSTRACT:Philip Roth’s 2007 novel, Exit Ghost, the final installment of the long-running Zuckerman series, examines the ways a writer’s legacy can be transformed after death. This essay considers how Roth’s novel extends the problem of a writer’s posthumous reputation to the problem of Holocaust memory in a coming world without witnesses. In Exit Ghost, the failure of Nathan Zuckerman and Amy Bellette to prevent the publication of a biography that will transform the reputation of another dead writer points toward the scandalizing process by which the Holocaust itself may be rendered unrecognizable with the passage of time. This essay further understands the motivations and limitations of the late-life alliance between Nathan and Amy through the lens of the last work of Italian writer and survivor, Primo Levi—a work referred to by Amy in Exit Ghost that is painfully attuned to the challenges facing Holocaust memory at the end of the twentieth century.
{"title":"Philip Roth and the “End of the Holocaust”","authors":"Anthony C. Wexler","doi":"10.1353/prs.2021.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/prs.2021.0006","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Philip Roth’s 2007 novel, Exit Ghost, the final installment of the long-running Zuckerman series, examines the ways a writer’s legacy can be transformed after death. This essay considers how Roth’s novel extends the problem of a writer’s posthumous reputation to the problem of Holocaust memory in a coming world without witnesses. In Exit Ghost, the failure of Nathan Zuckerman and Amy Bellette to prevent the publication of a biography that will transform the reputation of another dead writer points toward the scandalizing process by which the Holocaust itself may be rendered unrecognizable with the passage of time. This essay further understands the motivations and limitations of the late-life alliance between Nathan and Amy through the lens of the last work of Italian writer and survivor, Primo Levi—a work referred to by Amy in Exit Ghost that is painfully attuned to the challenges facing Holocaust memory at the end of the twentieth century.","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45902858","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 : 2021-02-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199846108.003.0009
I. Nadel
Anchoring this chapter is Philip Roth’s London life with Bloom and a set of new friends: Al Alvarez, critic, Harold Pinter, playwright, R. B. Kitaj, painter, Michael Herr, journalist, and Edna O’Brien, novelist. Roth enjoyed a culturally rich and satisfying life with Bloom, while working on The Professor of Desire. But he soon sensed the fraying of his relationship as Bloom became increasingly dependent on her daughter, the opera singer Anna Steiger. He soon began to work on adaptations, principally for Bloom but also for himself: one early attempt was his effort to adapt Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind, her Gulag autobiography. Another, new development was Roth’s involvement with Janet Hobhouse, novelist, their affair transposed to The Counterlife. And by the late 1970s, Roth turned to the experiences of an isolated writer in the countryside and the impact of the Holocaust through the possible afterlife of Anne Frank expressed in The Ghost Writer. Roth’s relationship with the New Yorker editor Veronica Geng and the continued importance of his editor Aaron Asher are also formidable figures. Comments on Roth’s enigmatic relationship with his mother (who died suddenly in 1981) end the chapter but not before a detailed accounting of Roth’s many illnesses (including a 1989 quintuple bypass) and the debilitating impact of illness on his physical and mental health.
{"title":"Supercarnal Productions","authors":"I. Nadel","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780199846108.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199846108.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Anchoring this chapter is Philip Roth’s London life with Bloom and a set of new friends: Al Alvarez, critic, Harold Pinter, playwright, R. B. Kitaj, painter, Michael Herr, journalist, and Edna O’Brien, novelist. Roth enjoyed a culturally rich and satisfying life with Bloom, while working on The Professor of Desire. But he soon sensed the fraying of his relationship as Bloom became increasingly dependent on her daughter, the opera singer Anna Steiger. He soon began to work on adaptations, principally for Bloom but also for himself: one early attempt was his effort to adapt Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind, her Gulag autobiography. Another, new development was Roth’s involvement with Janet Hobhouse, novelist, their affair transposed to The Counterlife. And by the late 1970s, Roth turned to the experiences of an isolated writer in the countryside and the impact of the Holocaust through the possible afterlife of Anne Frank expressed in The Ghost Writer. Roth’s relationship with the New Yorker editor Veronica Geng and the continued importance of his editor Aaron Asher are also formidable figures. Comments on Roth’s enigmatic relationship with his mother (who died suddenly in 1981) end the chapter but not before a detailed accounting of Roth’s many illnesses (including a 1989 quintuple bypass) and the debilitating impact of illness on his physical and mental health.","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77385204","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 : 2021-02-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199846108.003.0003
I. Nadel
This chapter examines Roth’s struggles with his father, his decision to go to college at Bucknell University after a year at Rutgers Newark, and his early girlfriends; the influence of his early professors at Bucknell and his editing the campus literary magazine where some of his earliest writing appeared. Graduate study at the University of Chicago and early publications followed, as well as his meeting influential novelists like Saul Bellow and Richard Stern. New friendships also emerged, notably with Theodore Solotaroff, critic and later editor of the New American Review, and Arthur Geffen and Barry Targan. “Bibliography by day, women by night” was their motto.
这一章考察了罗斯与父亲的斗争，他在罗格斯大学纽瓦克分校学习一年后决定去巴克内尔大学的决定，以及他早期的女朋友;他在巴克内尔大学早期教授的影响，以及他编辑的校园文学杂志，在那里他发表了一些最早的作品。随后，他在芝加哥大学(University of Chicago)读研究生，发表了早期作品，并结识了索尔·贝娄(Saul Bellow)和理查德·斯特恩(Richard Stern)等有影响力的小说家。新的友谊也出现了，特别是西奥多·索罗塔洛夫，评论家和后来的《新美国评论》的编辑，以及阿瑟·格芬和巴里·塔根。“白天是参考书目，晚上是女人”是他们的座右铭。
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Pub Date : 2021-02-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199846108.003.0007
I. Nadel
Roth travels with Barbara Sproul to Asia, while maintaining his opposition to the Vietnam War; his writing turns to satire in a general effort to undermine seriousness in politics and literature Baseball, long a love of Roth’s, emerges in his lengthy burlesque novel, The Great American Novel followed by his semi-autobiographical My Life as a Man (1974), a rebuke to his first wife, Maggie. In the midst of his writing, a bitter legal encounter with Norman Mailer involving the young writer Alan Lelchuk occurs, at the same time he develops a friendship with the important Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick, who admired Roth’s rewrite of Kafka, The Breast. But he also experiences sustained criticism from Irving Howe which he never forgot. Roth unexpectedly changes publishers leaving Random House for Holt with a new editor and soon-to-be friend, Aaron Asher.
{"title":"Jewish Wheaties","authors":"I. Nadel","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780199846108.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199846108.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Roth travels with Barbara Sproul to Asia, while maintaining his opposition to the Vietnam War; his writing turns to satire in a general effort to undermine seriousness in politics and literature Baseball, long a love of Roth’s, emerges in his lengthy burlesque novel, The Great American Novel followed by his semi-autobiographical My Life as a Man (1974), a rebuke to his first wife, Maggie. In the midst of his writing, a bitter legal encounter with Norman Mailer involving the young writer Alan Lelchuk occurs, at the same time he develops a friendship with the important Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick, who admired Roth’s rewrite of Kafka, The Breast. But he also experiences sustained criticism from Irving Howe which he never forgot. Roth unexpectedly changes publishers leaving Random House for Holt with a new editor and soon-to-be friend, Aaron Asher.","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73110261","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}
{"title":"Statement on the Possible Destruction of Essential Materials Pertaining to Philip Roth","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/prs.2021.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/prs.2021.0019","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66302623","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}
ABSTRACT:The Hebrew schoolboy protagonist Ozzie Freedman dominates Philip Roth's early story "The Conversion of the Jews" (1959). But the plot and significance of "Conversion" ultimately depend upon the actions of the practically invisible synagogue custodian, Yakov Blotnik. Ozzie, embroiled in a conflict with his teacher Rabbi Binder over a theological question, flees to the synagogue rooftop after an altercation during Hebrew School. From his rooftop vantage, Ozzie ultimately commands a crowd of assembled onlookers to vindicate him, lest he jump. Through the ensuing critical actions of Blotnik, Ozzie survives, leaping into the fireman's wide net toward rescue. The story is layered with meaning, and Blotnik is more than simply Ozzie's rescuer and custodian of the synagogue. He is keeper of Holocaust memory and symbolic guardian of the core of Jewish law and life, pikuach nefesh, which dictates that Jews' primary concern be life; for Jews, a law is to be ignored if life is at stake.
{"title":"The \"World's Least Thunderous Person\": Another Look at Philip Roth's \"Conversion of the Jews\"","authors":"C. B. Burch, Paul-William Burch","doi":"10.1353/prs.2020.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/prs.2020.0015","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:The Hebrew schoolboy protagonist Ozzie Freedman dominates Philip Roth's early story \"The Conversion of the Jews\" (1959). But the plot and significance of \"Conversion\" ultimately depend upon the actions of the practically invisible synagogue custodian, Yakov Blotnik. Ozzie, embroiled in a conflict with his teacher Rabbi Binder over a theological question, flees to the synagogue rooftop after an altercation during Hebrew School. From his rooftop vantage, Ozzie ultimately commands a crowd of assembled onlookers to vindicate him, lest he jump. Through the ensuing critical actions of Blotnik, Ozzie survives, leaping into the fireman's wide net toward rescue. The story is layered with meaning, and Blotnik is more than simply Ozzie's rescuer and custodian of the synagogue. He is keeper of Holocaust memory and symbolic guardian of the core of Jewish law and life, pikuach nefesh, which dictates that Jews' primary concern be life; for Jews, a law is to be ignored if life is at stake.","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42316199","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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