Posthumous Roth: Reflections on the Dilemmas of Historicizing Philip Roth's Fiction

ABSTRACT:By looking at how Roth's relevance as a writer of historical fiction has assumed new significance in recent discussions of The Plot Against America (2004) as a novel that helps to shed light on the "unforeseen" rise to power of Donald Trump, this discussion offers certain warnings about the abuses of an historicist criticism that seeks to assign polemical value to Roth's work. In so doing, this article examines the concerns dramatized in Exit Ghost (2007) about issues of posthumous legacy and contextual criticism as an avenue for speculating upon the possibilities for reading Roth within an historical light and claims that it is mistaken for readers to think of the author as one who holds fast to particular ideological positions or political loyalties. At the same time, it looks at how Roth's strained sense of loyalty to literary formalism, as articulated in his non-fiction, leaves room for sophisticated strategies of contextual criticism that avoid the kind of didactic moral and political readings that the author had always forsworn.