Winner of the 2018 Siegel/McDaniel Award: Upward Mobility and Zuckerman's (Negative) Dialectics in I Married a Communist

ABSTRACT:This article argues that Philip Roth's I Married a Communist (1998) presents readers with a politics of the beneficiary, whose upward mobility is at once a personal triumph and aided by several benefactors who embody the redistributive logic of the welfare state. Rather than pitting the individual against the community, Roth advocates a humble mode of social climbing whereby the individual depends on external support while developing the capacity to critique de-individualizing ideological and cultural pressures. In order to elucidate the connection between the individual's dependence on others and their growing skepticism, this article brings into conversation Roth's autobiographical writing, Bruce Robbins's work on upward-mobility stories, and Theodor Adorno's theory of negative dialectics.