Sex and Sexuality in Philip Roth's Kepesh
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European Literary Tradition in Roth's Kepesh Trilogy
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Volume 16 (2014) Issue 2 Article 8 European Literary Tradition in Roth's Kepesh Trilogy Gustavo Sánchez-Canales Autónoma University Madrid Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb Part of the American Studies Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Education Commons, European Languages and Societies Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Jewish Studies Commons, Other Arts and Humanities Commons, Other Film and Media Studies Commons, Reading and Language Commons, Rhetoric and Composition Commons, Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons, Television Commons, and the Theatre and Performance Studies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <[email protected]> Recommended Citation Sánchez-Canales, Gustavo. -
Philip Roth's Confessional Narrators: the Growth of Consciousness
Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1979 Philip Roth's Confessional Narrators: The Growth of Consciousness. Alexander George Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation George, Alexander, "Philip Roth's Confessional Narrators: The Growth of Consciousness." (1979). Dissertations. 1823. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/1823 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1979 Alexander George PHILIP ROTH'S CONFESSIONAL NARRATORS: THE GROWTH OF' CONSCIOUSNESS by Alexander George A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Loyola University of Chicago in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 1979 ACKNOWLEDGE~£NTS It is a singular pleasure to acknowledge the many debts of gratitude incurred in the writing of this dissertation. My warmest thanks go to my Director, Dr. Thomas Gorman, not only for his wise counsel and practical guidance, but espec~ally for his steadfast encouragement. I am also deeply indebted to Dr. Paul Messbarger for his careful reading and helpful criticism of each chapter as it was written. Thanks also must go to Father Gene Phillips, S.J., for the benefit of his time and consideration. I am also deeply grateful for the all-important moral support given me by my family and friends, especially Dr. -
The Woman of Ressentiment in When She Was Good Nicole Peeler
The Woman of Ressentiment in When She Was Good Nicole Peeler Philip Roth Studies, Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2010, pp. 31-45 (Article) Published by Purdue University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/383556 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] The Woman of Ressentiment in When She Was Good Nicole Peeler ABSTRACT. Read alongside Nietzsche’s theory of ressentiment, this essay chal- lenges the popular critique that When She Was Good (1967) serves as proof of Philip Roth’s misogyny or his hatred of his ex-wife. Instead, the author argues that When She Was Good actually presages Roth’s developing interest in the pre-ideological formation of values that we see in later works such as Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), Sabbath’s Theater (1995), and American Pastoral (1997). When She Was Good (1967) was published five years before Irving Howe and Norman Podhoretz used the pages of Commentary to attack Philip Roth as an arrogant iconoclast, determined to destroy both Jewish and American liter- ary high culture with the force of his anger, his vulgarity, and his inability to understand or appreciate “middle-class America and what later came to be called ‘family values’” (Podhoretz 32). While this “reading” was leveled at Roth as a response to Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), Howe’s and Podhoretz’s critical “intervention” actually restates in quite simplistic terms elements of the relationship between morality and life that I would argue has been the subject of Roth’s fiction from its inception and that is fully realized in When She Was Good. -
Front Matter
Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-68293-0 - The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth Edited by Timothy Parrish Frontmatter More information The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth From the moment that his debut book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), won him the National Book Award and earned him attacks from the Jewish community, Philip Roth has been among the most influential and consistently controver- sial writers of our age. Now the author of more than twenty novels, numerous stories, two memoirs, and two books of literary criticism, Roth has used his writing to continually reinvent himself – and in doing so remake the American literary landscape. This Companion provides the most comprehensive intro- duction to the works and thought of this major American author in a collection of newly commissioned essays from distinguished scholars. Beginning with the urgency of Roth’s early fiction and extending to the vitality of his most recent novels, these essays trace Roth’s artistic engagement with questions about eth- nic identity, postmodernism, Israel, the Holocaust, sexuality, and the human psyche itself. They recognize that Roth’s work resonates through American culture because he demands that his readers pursue the kinds of self-invention, the endless remakings, that define both Roth’s characters and his own identity as an author. New and returning Roth readers, students and scholars, will find this Companion authoritative and accessible. © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-68293-0 - The Cambridge -
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© Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. 1 Introduction: Roth Antagonistes ecrying the “sanitized” eulogy he has just heard delivered over Dthe coffin of his friend the novelist Nathan Zuckerman, who has sud denly died during heart surgery, an unidentified mourner, bearded and middle-aged, gives an impromptu countereulogy on the sidewalk: He made it easy for them. Just went in there and died. This is a death we can all feel good about. Not like cancer....The cancer deaths are horri fying. That’s what I would have figured him for. Wouldn’t you? Where was the rawness and the mess? Where was the embarrassment and the shame? Shame in this guy operated always.Here is a writer who broke taboos, fucked around, indiscreet, stepped outside that stuff deliberately, and they bury him like Neil Simon—Simonize our filthy, self-afflicted Zuck! Hegel’s unhappy consciousness out under the guise of sentiment and love! This unsatisfiable, suspect, quarrelsome novelist, this ego driven to its furthest extremes, ups and presents them with a palatable death—and the feeling police, the grammar police, they give him a palatable funeral with all the horseshit and the mythmaking!...I can’t get over it. He’s not even going to rot in the ground, this guy who was made for it. This insidious, unregenerate defiler, this irritant in the Jew ish bloodstream, making people uncomfortable and angry by looking with a mirror up his own asshole, really despised by a lot of smart peo ple, offensive to every possible lobby, and they put him away, decontam inated, deloused—suddenly he’s Abe Lincoln and Chaim Weizmann in one! Could this be what he wanted, this kosherization, this stenchless ness? I really had him down for cancer, the works. -
Introduction
ONE Introduction “Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness” There are combinations of pleasure and pain . in tragedy and comedy, not only on stage but on the greater stage of human life. —Plato, Philebus 50B PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR Philip Roth combines “sheer playfulness and deadly seriousness”1 as he derides the self-deceiving misconceptions of a complacent society obsessed with acquiring prestige and material success. Roth is well known for the caustic humor with which he treats our age, the Jewish community, and himself. Sometimes his criticism takes shape as offen- sive humor exaggerating the foibles and weaknesses of the Jewish community. It also can be self-lacerating, focusing on Roth’s own psychological frailties. Through the comic mode, Roth makes us aware that we live in a bizarre car- toon world where the ludicrous and the calamitous merge, a world in which black humor keeps reappearing and we do not know whether to laugh or cry. Roth’s style can be compared to that of a stand-up comedian such as Lenny Bruce. He often delights in telling a joke for its own sake. He employs the laughable for comic relief. He utilizes the comic to address serious issues that underlie the satire. He uses fast-moving exchanges that could be termed a “kind of stand-up comedy,” where clashing positions are shrilly declared. Robert Alter points out that the shrill, comic interchanges are “what Jewish comedians of the ’50s used to call ‘spritz’” (Alter, “Spritzer” 34). These exchanges often turn into long monologues that reveal the foolish positions of their loquacious orators.2 1 © 2006 State University of New York Press, Albany 2 MOCKING THE AGE Another stand-up comic device is blatantly obvious word play. -
Editor's Column Derek Parker Royal
Editor's Column Derek Parker Royal Philip Roth Studies, Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2010, pp. 9-11 (Article) Published by Purdue University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/383554 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] Editor’s Column Derek Parker Royal Philip Roth has had his share of troubles when it comes to women, at least the fictional kind. In the early decades of his career, he was accused by many readers of stacking the deck against his female characters, contorting women’s issues, and even engaging in blatant misogynist stereotypes. Figures such as Brenda Potemkin, Libby Herz, Lucy Nelson, Mary Jane Reed (aka “The Mon- key”), and Maureen Tarnopol were criticized as unflattering representations that served merely as passive and vapid backdrops to the more complicated, albeit neurotic, male protagonists. And with works such as The Professor of Desire (1977) and The Great American Novel (1973)—the latter being called by Janis P. Stout outright misogynistic—Roth was not seen as the most sensi- tive of authors. Read as either Jewish American princesses, unsympathetic actants, or sexual objects of desire, his women characters helped to contribute to what had become, even as late as the early 1990s, Roth’s reputation as a writer of “men’s novels.” However, such an unequivocal reading of this fiction does not do it justice. As Marshall Bruce Gentry has pointed out, Roth’s representation of women, and of gender roles in a broader sense, are quite complicated and should not be discounted as merely “anti-woman” or “male-centered.” In fact, Gentry’s perspective was timely, arriving at what can be seen now as a turning point in Roth’s career, or at least a turning point in his critical reception. -
Queering Philip Roth: Homosocial Discourse in 'An Actor's
Queering Philip Roth: homosocial discourse in 'An actor’s life for me', 'Letting go', 'Sabbath’s theater' and the 'American trilogy' Article Accepted Version Brauner, D. (2015) Queering Philip Roth: homosocial discourse in 'An actor’s life for me', 'Letting go', 'Sabbath’s theater' and the 'American trilogy'. Studies in the Novel, 48 (1). pp. 86-106. ISSN 1934-1512 doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2016.0003 Available at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/46066/ It is advisable to refer to the publisher’s version if you intend to cite from the work. See Guidance on citing . To link to this article DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2016.0003 Publisher: John Hopkins University All outputs in CentAUR are protected by Intellectual Property Rights law, including copyright law. Copyright and IPR is retained by the creators or other copyright holders. Terms and conditions for use of this material are defined in the End User Agreement . www.reading.ac.uk/centaur CentAUR Central Archive at the University of Reading Reading’s research outputs online 1 QUEERING PHILIP ROTH: HOMOSOCIAL DISCOURSE IN “AN ACTOR’S LIFE FOR ME, LETTING GO, SABBATH’S THEATER AND THE “AMERICAN TRILOGY”1 DAVID BRAUNER As the editors of Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (2003) point out, “modern Jewish and homosexual identities [have] emerged as traces of each other”, perhaps most conspicuously and tragically in “the ways that Jews ... were powerfully associated with the abjected homosexual” in Nazi propaganda (1, 2). Sander Gilman, among others, has documented the long history -
Nemesis and the Persistence of Tragic Framing: Bucky Cantor As Job, Hebrew Prometheus, And
1 Nemesis and the Persistence of Tragic Framing: Bucky Cantor as Job, Hebrew Prometheus, and Reverse Oedipus Nicholas Stangherlin ABSTRACT. This article analyzes the protagonist of Nemesis, Eugene “Bucky” Cantor, in order to delineate those elements that define him not only as a Promethean figure, but as a modern incarnation of both Job and Oedipus. The evocative power of these archetypes contributes to establishing the tragic framework of the novel and the heroic status of its protagonist, both of which resist the narrator’s attempt to deconstruct them in the final chapter. The Prometheus archetype is a recurrent presence in Philip Roth’s works and it is in the Nemeses tetralogy that the author further develops the syncretic use of topoi and symbols of Hebrew and Greek mythology and Attic tragedy that had only been hinted at in American Pastoral. If in the Zuckerman novels, particularly in Zuckerman Bound and The Anatomy Lesson, the figure of Prometheus is alluded to with a certain degree of irony, in the American trilogy it acquires a more epic grandeur and tragic gravitas.1 Moreover, in American Pastoral, Roth introduces Jobian themes, which he is able to integrate within the context of the Swede’s Promethean transgression of the boundaries of ethnicity and history. The objective of this article is to analyze the characteristics of the protagonist of Nemesis, Eugene “Bucky” Cantor, in order to define those elements that make him not only a Promethean figure, but a modern incarnation of the biblical Job. Moreover, I will discuss those traits that Bucky shares with the figure of Oedipus; it will be observed how the very co-existence within the protagonist of the intrinsically divergent features of Job, Prometheus and Oedipus contributes to heightening the tragedy of his fall. -
Rethinking Race in Philip Roth's the Human Stain
ROCZNIKI HUMANISTYCZNE Tom LXIV, zeszyt 11 — 2016 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18290/rh.2016.64.11-9 PATRYCJA ANTOSZEK * THE PHANTOM IN AMERICAN ARCADIA: RETHINKING RACE IN PHILIP ROTH’S THE HUMAN STAIN A b s t r a c t. The article explores the problem of race and racial ambiguity in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000). Referring to Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Liter- ary Imagination and her assumptions concerning “the Africanist presence,” the paper discusses how the character’s repressed African-American past returns to haunt not only the protagonist but also the reader. As biracial Coleman Silk succeeds in passing for a Jew, his body becomes a sig- nifier whose signified turns out to be problematic. While Roth’s narrative argues that the ideal of a self-made man that the protagonist represents is always already haunted by the ghost of racial uncertainty, it also demonstrates that the issue of race functions in contemporary writing primarily as a metaphor, or “a way of referring to and disguising forces, events, classes, and expressions of social decay and economic division far more threatening to the body politic than biological ‘race’ ever was.” Finally, the paper explores the way in which Roth’s novel addresses the long familiar fear that racial boundaries do not exist and the coherent white American self is an illusion. Key words: African American; biracial; identity; Jewish-American; passing; race; racial bounda- ries; whiteness. Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain (2000), a third book in his “American trilogy” including American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998) is, at least on the surface, a story of racial passing. -
A Conversation with Philip Roth Philip Roth
Ontario Review Volume 1 Fall 1974 Article 3 August 2014 A Conversation with Philip Roth Philip Roth Joyce Carol Oates Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.usfca.edu/ontarioreview Part of the Nonfiction Commons Recommended Citation Roth, Philip and Oates, Joyce Carol (2014) "A Conversation with Philip Roth," Ontario Review: Vol. 1, Article 3. Available at: http://repository.usfca.edu/ontarioreview/vol1/iss1/3 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Published by USF Scholarship: a digital repository @ Gleeson Library | Geschke Center, 2014 A Conversation with Philip Roth JOYCE CAROL OATES JCO: Your first book, Goodbye, Columbus, won the most distinguished American literary honor—the National Book Award—in 1960; you were twenty-seven years old at that time. A few years later, your third novel, Portnoy's Complaint, achieved a critical and popular success—and noto riety—that must have altered your personal life, and your awareness of yourself as a writer with a great deal of public "influence." Do you believe that your sense of having experienced life, its ironies and depths, has been at all intensified by your public reputation? Have you come to know more because of your fame? Or has the experience of enduring the bizarre pro jections of others been at times more than you can reasonably handle? ROTH: My public reputation—as distinguished from the reputation of my work—is something I try to have as little to do with as I can. I know it's out there, of course—a concoction spawned by Portnoy's Complaint and compounded largely out of the fantasies that book gave rise to in readers because of its "confessional" strategy, and also because of its financial suc cess. -
Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-48929-4 — Philip Roth in Context Edited by Maggie Mckinley Index More Information
Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-48929-4 — Philip Roth in Context Edited by Maggie McKinley Index More Information Index Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, Conrad, Joseph, , Albert, Elisa, Cooper, James Fenimore, Allen, Mary, American Pastoral (film), DeLillo, Don, , Anderson, Sherwood, , Derrida, Jacques, Anti-Defamation League, , Dos Passos, John, Appelfeld, Aharon, , , –, , , Dostoevsky, Fyodor, , , , , Dreiser, Theodore, , Apple, Sam, Dunham, Lena, Arendt, Hannah, , , Atwood, Margaret, Einstein, Albert, Auster, Paul, , Elegy, , , Ellison, Ralph, , , , , Babel, Isaac, Ellmann, Richard, Bailey, Blake, , Emerson, Ralph Waldo, –, Baraka, Amiri, Englander, Nathan, , Barnes, Julian, Erdrich, Louise, , Barth, John, , , – Barthelme, Donald, Farrell, James T., , Battle of Blood Island, The, Farrow, Mia, Bellow, Saul, , , , , , –, , Fast, Howard, –, , , –, , , Faulkner, William, , , , , Fiedler, Leslie, , Berkshires, The, – Flaubert, Henri, , , , , – Berman, Jeffrey, , Foer, Jonathan Safran, Berman, Shelley, Foucault, Michel, Bloom, Claire, , , , , , , , Frank, Anne. See The Ghost Writer , Franklin, Ruth, Bloom, Harold, , , Freud, Sigmund, , –, –, Bruce, Lenny, , –, Bukiet, Melvin, Gaddis, William, , Caruth, Cathy, – Ghost Writer, The (film), – Cather, Willa, , Golden, Harry, , Chabon, Michael, Goodbye, Columbus (film), , Chaim, Chofetz, Gornick, Vivian, , Cheever, John, –, Great Depression, Chekhov, Anton, , , Civil Rights Movement, , , , Halliday, Lisa, , Coetzee, J.M., Hawthorne, Nathaniel,