{"title":"\"A Jew without Jewishness\": Muted Voices Unbound in Philip Roth's The Counterlife","authors":"Cristina Chevereșan","doi":"10.5703/philrothstud.16.1.0111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5703/philrothstud.16.1.0111","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:In The Counterlife (1986), Philip Roth turns to postmodern innovation via an intricate web of counternarratives in order to examine the complexity of contemporary Jewishness, alongside its fluid relationship with space, memory, and public and private identity. This essay focuses on the truths residing on the fringes of The Counterlife, dwelling on the liminal spaces created by seemingly unimportant lines and episodes. The analysis is meant to prove that such liminal remarks or actions illustrate the depths of inborn and constructed bias concerning otherness and difference (preponderantly racial), significantly feeding the book's major acknowledged arguments. This essay argues that, in the context of the perpetual Jewish struggle for self-definition and self-understanding across geographical and ideological borders, Roth aims to deconstruct stereotypical representations and to challenge established versions of history by showcasing various overlooked and/or marginal(ized) positions and dilemmas.","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49508611","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 Fantasy of Purity Is Appalling\": (De)constructing Identity in The Human Stain","authors":"Elliott","doi":"10.5703/philrothstud.16.1.0092","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5703/philrothstud.16.1.0092","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Criticism on Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000) has often suggested that the novel be viewed as a celebration of the asocial individualism of the protagonist, Coleman Silk. \"(De)constructing Identity in The Human Stain\" claims that although certain perspectives in the novel—those of Coleman, his sister Ernestine, and Nathan Zuckerman—disclose their investment in Coleman's project of self-determination, these viewpoints are undermined by the text in important ways. Indeed, this essay argues that the novel accommodates a position that is antithetical to Coleman's belief that he can transcend his own history, reading Roth's novel in light of Alasdair MacIntyre's insistence that one's life must be understood in the context of a narrative over which one has limited control.","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47713133","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":"At Least Associated: When She Was Good and the Vietnam Years","authors":"Rachael Mclennan","doi":"10.5703/PHILROTHSTUD.16.1.0074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5703/PHILROTHSTUD.16.1.0074","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Over fifty years since its publication, the critical consensus appears to understand When She Was Good (1967) as a curiosity in Roth's oeuvre. It is time for a reappraisal. This article reads the novel in relation to Roth's discussion of what he calls \"politicization\" in \"the Vietnam years,\" and attempts to rehabilitate the novel and its central character, Lucy Nelson. It argues that the novel is concerned with exploring the gaps between what people say and what they mean, as this pertains to both describing and shaping American reality—an exploration which has implications for understanding the novel's narrative voice.","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44368328","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":"Divine Spark: On the Radical Feminism of Roth","authors":"E. Albert","doi":"10.5703/philrothstud.16.1.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5703/philrothstud.16.1.0006","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41523121","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":"\"Incest, Blood, Shame. Are They Not Enough to Make One Feel Sinful?\": Miltonic Figurations of Incest and Disobedience in Philip Roth's American Pastoral","authors":"Rl Goldberg","doi":"10.5703/philrothstud.16.1.0033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5703/philrothstud.16.1.0033","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article considers, as its starting point, Roth's indebtedness in American Pastoral (1997) to John Milton's Paradise Lost. In particular, this article is concerned with representations of incest in both texts. Drawing on Milton's cosmology, Roth in American Pastoral situates father-daughter incest as the primary scene of destruction. Further, this essay considers the strange positing of incest in Zuckerman's fictional account of the Swede and the foundational status incest is accorded in the problem of undoing the pastoral. Narratively foundational, incest in this novel is for Roth, as it is for Milton, chronologically inseparable from the failures of the liberal state; that is, incest becomes a metonym for the paradise lost.","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42109315","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 on the American Screen: \"Serious\" Literature and Popular Democracy","authors":"Gerard O’Donoghue","doi":"10.5703/philrothstud.16.1.0053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5703/philrothstud.16.1.0053","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Philip Roth seemed to endorse Leo Glucksman's thesis in I Married a Communist (1998)—that politics, \"the great generalizer,\" stands in \"an antagonistic relationship\" to literature, \"the great particularizer\" (606)—during the public address he gave upon his eightieth birthday. Roth pronounced, \"a fervor for the singular and a profound aversion to generalities is fiction's lifeblood\" (\"The Ruthless Intimacy\" 393). Glucksman, however, made his declaration from the margins of a novel profoundly concerned with national politics—a novel, moreover, which participates in a trilogy that initiated what Bryan Cheyette calls the \"national turn\" in Roth's late career (163). The tensions between the mission of what Glucksman defines as \"serious literature\" (Communist 607) and readings of Roth's fiction's salience, or instrumentality, in national politics are only heightened when that fiction is adapted for the screen. This essay examines these tensions within two 2016 screen adaptations of Roth's fiction: Ewan McGregor's American Pastoral and James Schamus's Indignation.","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41245633","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 Tolstoy of the Zulus","authors":"I. Nadel","doi":"10.5703/philrothstud.15.2.0104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5703/philrothstud.15.2.0104","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":"44700283","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":"Entering into the Green: Philip Roth and the Pastoral Impulse","authors":"Joshua Lander","doi":"10.5703/philrothstud.15.2.0044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5703/philrothstud.15.2.0044","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This essay, informed by Annette Kolodny's research on the \"pastoral impulse,\" re-examines Philip Roth's subversion of myth in American Pastoral (1997), illuminating the ways Roth exposes and critiques the gendered chasms within America's national narratives. The article connects Roth's novel to John Milton's Paradise Lost as a way of re-considering how the Swede valorizes Dawn as an Eve-like figure of perfection. I focus on how Roth, via Zuckerman, positions Merry and Rita as a hybridized Miltonic serpent who seeks to bring about Seymour and Dawn's fall from the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. By doing so, I argue Roth's problematic representation of women in American Pastoral works to deconstruct the gendered patriarchal narrative that underlies America's \"pastoral impulse.\"","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":"44008366","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":"\"There's Always More to a Story Than a Body Can See from a Fence Line\": Philip Roth and Barbara Kingsolver","authors":"J. Newman","doi":"10.5703/philrothstud.15.2.0084","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5703/philrothstud.15.2.0084","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:In Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000) and Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer (2000), concepts of insider and outsider, purity and pollution, are fundamental to both action and narrative structure, specifically in relation to Mary Douglas's analysis of classificatory systems in Purity and Danger (1966). Reading these novels in relation to Douglas's work reveals that both writers displace the reader from a position of dominance and allow the story to move across textual fields into uncharted areas, redrawing previously firm literary or narrative boundaries.","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":"47374264","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 Sensitive Son and the Feminine Ideal in Literature: Writers from Rousseau to Roth","authors":"A. Petracca","doi":"10.5703/philrothstud.15.2.0109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5703/philrothstud.15.2.0109","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":"44856345","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}