Athenian Logomachy in The Human Stain and Philip Roth’s Fight for the Word

Abstract: In The Human Stain (2000), Philip Roth develops a concern that animates his canon: the potentials and dangers of our most human trait—our capacity to fire back and forth words and letters. For Coleman Silk, in the world of Athena College—just as in ancient Athens—the battle of words in the forum becomes as dangerous as the battle of swords on the Homeric battlefield, and a mission of Roth in this novel, as in other works, is to turn logomachy into self-reflective art about the violence and corruption of the word in the American city-state.