{"title":"Reading Himself and Others: Roth's Why Write? and Sartre's \"Why Write?\"","authors":"James Duban","doi":"10.1353/prs.2023.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/prs.2023.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:What might readers infer from the identical titles and related concerns of Sartre's \"Pourquoi écrire?\" (\"Why Write?\") and Roth's Why Write?, his collected nonfiction, 1960-2013? Some of the concerns of that volume appear to link the more pervasive synthesis of nothingness and possibility in Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943) to Arthur Koestler's advocacy, in Insight and Outlook (1949), of \"bisociative\" cognition. At stake, for Roth, when reading himself and others, are incisive rejoinders to \"insensate readers\" who, ignoring the difference between personal identity and imaginative excursion, surrender personal responsibility while denigrating artistic prowess.","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46493749","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":"Roth and the Poets","authors":"I. Nadel","doi":"10.1353/prs.2023.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/prs.2023.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Beginning with a survey of the key poets in Philip Roth's personal library—there are over eighty—this essay considers the function, style, and value of poetry in his work. At many of the most intense moments in Roth's fiction, a poetic lyricism dominates, whether it is Mickey Sabbath at the Jersey shore or the final paragraph of The Human Stain (2000). From the start of his career, Roth found a place for poetry—whether in his earliest short stories or in his most successful fiction, notably Portnoy's Complaint (1969), Sabbath's Theater (1995), or American Pastoral (1997), although its function shifted from the explicit sexuality of \"Leda and the Swan\" in Portnoy's Complaint to the meditative pastoralism of Indian Hill camp in Nemesis (2010). Its presence constantly reflects Roth's literary grounding originating in his undergraduate and graduate readings supplemented by contact with poets at Chicago, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Princeton, and Penn. Specific remarks on individual poems will reflect their use in individual novels with Donne, Milton, and Keats featured.","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47821583","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":"Editors’ Note","authors":"Aimee Pozorski, Maren Scheurer","doi":"10.1353/prs.2023.a907256","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/prs.2023.a907256","url":null,"abstract":"Editors’ Note Aimee Pozorski and Maren Scheurer We have lately been thinking about the idea of the backlog—at once an editor’s greatest source of fear and hope. The word itself connotes accumulation, unfinished business, and work that needs to be tended or addressed. And while the connotations are not always positive, for an editor of a peer reviewed journal, a robust backlog can be a rare gift. It means that scholars and readers are invested in keeping the journal going with a submission of their very own. It also assumes trust: trust that the work will be handled by editors with integrity and respect and trust that the journal will continue, long after the peer review process is complete. When we became co-executive editors of Philip Roth Studies now over four years ago, our predecessors, Dr. Debra Shostak and Dr. David Brauner, offered words of wisdom and warning: be mindful of the backlog, they said. The backlog holds the key to the success of the journal. We took this advice to heart and cultivated our backlog as one tends a garden, looking forward to a time when it bears fruit. In the last few years, we have had the pleasure of working with the authors whose work was accepted under Deb and David, and we have had the pleasure of working with authors who came on board after that. We have come to appreciate, even find comfort in, the cyclical nature of editing a peer reviewed journal—seeing an essay come in before sending it out to two anonymous readers, communicating with the authors invaluable feedback from our editorial board, filing accepted work for safe keeping and, over a year later, returning to it again to undertake the process of preparing the essay for publication. This process involves at least three more readings—one for argument, one for paragraph and sentence coherence, and one for copy editing. The process is long and for some, mentally draining. It is also, paradoxically, invigorating and restorative. It ends in something we can all hold in our hands or read online, a production in every sense of the word. The back and forth we undertake with contributors can be dizzying, electrifying, exhausting, and rewarding. We sometimes worry for our authors who undertake this journey with us and may not realize that being added to the backlog is only a first step of many that ultimately ends with a near finalized draft in their inboxes. These drafts contain for us what feels to be the universe, ongoing conversations we engage with each other and with Dr. Jessica Rabin, our associate copy editor, about our positions on such issues as diction, punctuation, and style. We are now at the point in our careers editing Philip Roth Studies where we are mindful that we are building on the backlog for our successors. We are preparing to deliver what we hope are similarly wise remarks for the next team seeking to build [End Page 1] and cultivate our most treasured asset: the store of essays that will keep the journal going long after we step away. T","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495360","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":"Philip Roth e l’Italia","authors":"Silvia Raimondi","doi":"10.1353/prs.2023.a907265","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/prs.2023.a907265","url":null,"abstract":"Philip Roth e l’Italia Silvia Raimondi (bio) Francesco Samarini. Philip Roth e l’Italia: Storia di un amore incostante. Longo Editore, 2022. 343 pp. 28 € hardback. To understand the ambitiousness of francesco samarini’s project, it is worth starting from the chosen title of his book. Writing about the relation between Philip Roth and Italy means in fact devoting oneself to an extensive and accurate analysis of the writer’s entire narrative oeuvre in search of traces of a link—more or less evident—with the peninsula, by analyzing interviews, letters, and personal or business contacts with overseas publishers. It also means approaching complex archival work, taking as reference published and unpublished documents preserved both in the United States and in Italy. And that is precisely what Samarini does in what is intended to be—and is—a rich and wide-ranging volume of scholarship, also remarkable for its originality, precision, and comprehensiveness in impartially examining the peculiarities of the Italian reception of Roth’s work. Far from being distinguished by the factiousness and superficiality present in some of the numerous articles and critical essays on Philip Roth’s enormous fame in Italy (mostly highlighted by critic Paolo di Paolo in a piece published for L’Espresso), Philip Roth e l’Italia: Storia di un amore incostante functions thus as a non-rhetorical and in-depth study that constitutes “an interesting observatory” (Samarini 7)1 to investigate both the production of the American author and his reception overseas. What therefore particularly emerges from Samarini’s work, and immediately impresses the reader, is the breadth of its analysis—even more evident by looking at the organization of the book itself. After a brief introduction aimed at outlining the areas of research, the main corpus of the volume consists of nine chapters, which range from Roth’s publishing history and his early days to addressing some specific thematic topics, such as the presence of Italy and Italians in his writing. These do not “merely” examine the existing connections between Roth and Italy, but also have the purpose of covering the biography of the American writer, following his life chronologically starting with 1958/1959 (the publication date in America of Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories). Specifically, chapters II through VIII provide exhaustive biographical information, covering relevant aspects of the writer’s personal [End Page 104] and professional life—both in Italy and America. These include Roth’s literary origins (chapter II); the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) and the positive and negative reviews associated with it (chapter III); the consequences of Roth’s public success between 1971 and 1978 (chapter IV); the difficulties he faces between 1979 and 1989 (chapter V, in which the writer’s friendship with Primo Levi is also discussed); his “stagnation” and subsequent “resurrection” following the publication of works such as A","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495363","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":"The Fragmented Mark: Zuckerman’s Characters as Self-Making in The Human Stain","authors":"Joseph Ozias","doi":"10.1353/prs.2023.a907260","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/prs.2023.a907260","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Much of the discourse surrounding Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000) either deals with the novel as about America and American self-making or as about Coleman Silk. Little scholarship, however, deals with Zuckerman, the narrator, as a character central to the story; this essay seeks to show that Zuckerman not only invents the personal lives of his characters, but he invents himself, and he does so through his semi-imagined versions of each of the characters. Coleman is who he wishes himself to be, Farley is Zuckerman’s model of how not to live, Delphine is the warning about the very book he writes—the version of himself that lies about who he is—and Faunia acts as his moral compass and guide, perhaps the most important of his creations given how his narrative decisions reflect her sensibilities. Zuckerman’s characterizations of the key players and his suppositions about their interiority, then, result in Zuckerman’s own characterization.","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495573","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":"Beware White Male Rothians","authors":"Jacques Berlinerblau","doi":"10.1353/prs.2023.a907262","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/prs.2023.a907262","url":null,"abstract":"Beware White Male Rothians Jacques Berlinerblau (bio) I am not one to subscribe to crude sociological stereotypes. yet i can’t help but notice that a certain type of person intensely dislikes my recent book The Philip Roth We Don’t Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography (2021). Save one exception, that pattern has been evident from the peer-review process, through the pre-publication phase (see Zoller 2022; Sutter 2021), right on down to a trio of scathing reviews I will discuss forthwith. White male Rothians, it would seem, are impervious to the charms of my arguments. It is indeed better, as Gary Shteyngart once quipped, to be patronized than to be ignored. As a former book review editor for this very journal, I long ago learned that many fine monographs sit unreviewed because we couldn’t find scholars to assess them (more about that, anon). As such, I thank Professor Steven Kellman (The Forward), Professor Andy Connolly (Voegelin View), and Eric Vanderwall (Philip Roth Studies) for paying attention to this text. But fellas, respectfully, a book review is not a drive-by shooting! All professional scholars give and take their share of serrated criticism. To be an academician is to administer, and be subjected to, the learned snark of countless anonymous Reviewers Number Two. Even novelists, like Nathan Zuckerman in The Anatomy Lesson (1983), endured “the two-thousand-, three-thousand-, five-thousand-word lashing” that rankles for life (78). It’s probably best to suffer such indignities in silence—a truism borne out by Zuckerman’s ill-fated rant delivered to his bewildered tormentor, Milton Appel. In this case, however, I feel strongly—as battered authors are wont to do—that a rebuttal might be both timely and beneficial. Our world is falling down, so why not have a spirited, no-holds-barred conversation about race, sex, autobiography, pedagogy, and even scholarly mores as they pertain to book reviewing? After all, Philip Roth has passed away. His core audience is graying or dead. The market for serious literature, as the master grimly foretold, is dwindling. The humanities as a vocation teeter on the brink of extinction (Berlinerblau, “They’ve Been Scheming”). These troubled times offer scholars and lovers of fiction an opportunity to speak frankly. [End Page 82] If anything good emerges from this exchange, then it will be to arrive at a less sociologically crude definition of the White Male Rothian. ROTH AND RACE My analysis of Roth’s racial portraiture has not been warmly received. I approached my inquiry by collating every single depiction of African and African-American characters in his fiction from the 1952 “Box of Truths” to the 2010 Nemesis. This comprehensive analysis had not been performed before. I believe this is why researchers who had previously studied Roth and race drew conclusions different from my own. The patterns I discovered often surprised me. The patterns, to be frank, often troubled me. Roth’s portraits of his Black character","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495345","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":"Human Blues","authors":"Miriam Jaffe, Lluvia de Segovia de Kraker","doi":"10.1353/prs.2023.a907266","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/prs.2023.a907266","url":null,"abstract":"Human Blues Miriam Jaffe (bio) and Lluvia de Segovia de Kraker (bio) Elisa Albert. Human Blues. New York: Avid Reader Press, 2022. 401 pp. $28.00 hardback. Elisa albert gained her foothold as a jewish american fiction writer when she closed her short story collection with a letter to Philip Roth in which she offered to have his baby (How This Night Is Different, Free Press, 2006). That “baby” is Albert’s creative output, including The Book of Dahlia (Free Press, 2008), which automortographically renders Jewish American family dynamics, and Afterbirth (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), in which Albert explores the metaphorical connection between motherhood and authorship. In both of these novels, and in her work as an essayist, Albert channels the spirit of Philip Roth. Her latest novel, Human Blues, displays an array of Rothian attributes in contemplation of motherhood and creativity. The protagonist, Aviva, is a singer-songwriter fanning her emerging fame with controversy: imagine young Zuckerman of The Ghost Writer (1979) and his obsession with E. I. Lonoff—but female and obsessed with Amy Winehouse. And imagine this same Zuckerman, in The Human Stain (2008) and Exit Ghost (2007), incontinent and impotent, grieving the loss of virility at the center of his gender identity. Such is Aviva, but her problem of womanhood is that she is unable to conceive without medical intervention, or perhaps even with it. The novel is written during nine menstrual cycles of Aviva’s ruminations on infertility and motherhood as she faces off with social media posts and other forms of technology directed at women’s (re)productivity. Aviva performs these ruminations. The “performance” associated with celebrity is a metaphor for the roles assigned in various stages of gender and sexual identity: humans experience disappointment and shame when they cannot perform according to societal expectations. Perhaps with a nod to Simon Axler, a Rothian Jewish stage performer, Aviva’s inability to become naturally pregnant is her “humbling” (26). Axler is humbled by the loss of his sexual relevance, and Aviva is humbled by barrenness, which challenges her sense of womanhood. She encounters the fertility industry, which entices women to pay with their savings and minds and bodies for drugs and regulation and mostly harmful therapies. And like many of Roth’s pontificating narrators, who serve to [End Page 108] explore each novel’s polemic, Albert’s narrator scrutinizes the societal assumption that womanhood requires childbearing. Yet Aviva grieves the dispossession of these expectations with a cantankerous bereavement akin to the complex mourning process of another performer: Mickey Sabbath. An early review of Sabbath’s Theater (1995) describes the writing as “anti-moral,” with “plenty of nastiness” and “a narrative that moves, as its emotional temperature dictates” into “perverse confession” (Pritchard). The same could be said of Human Blues, whose female protagonist rages back at","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495366","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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