DOCSLIB.ORG

The Atheistic Imagination: a Challenge for Jews, Christians And

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Atheistic Imagination: a Challenge for Jews, Christians And “There is in recent years something fashionable in describing oneself as an atheist. The New Atheists get advertised and reviewed in The New York Times. Theologians do not.” CNS documentary service Roth, Irish writer Colm Tóibín and the British contents Indian writer Salman Rushdie to “see what they 17 The Atheistic Imagination: criticize about their ancestral faith and to inter- A Challenge for Jews, rogate what people of Jewish, Christian and Christians and Muslims Muslim faith might learn from those critiques.” by Father Patrick J. Ryan, SJ Roth, he said, “intends to expose the cruelty of God, the capriciousness of the world in which 26 Ad Limina Address to we live,” he said. It is a dark vision, and “glibly U.S. Catholic Bishops on Catholic Education expressed faith needs to pause in the presence by Pope Benedict XVI of such darkness — pause and reflect.” Tóibín, 27 The Catholic who is gay and critical of Catholicism and Understanding of its teaching on sexuality, nonetheless shows Ecumenism an aesthetic attachment to his ancestral faith by Father Ronald G. even as he expresses his alienation from it, Roberson, CSP said Father Ryan, a reminder that “it is impor- 30 Protect the Poor, Promote The Atheistic tant not to underemphasize the aesthetic as a the Common Good way of knowing God and reaching out to God by Bishop Stephen E. Blaire Imagination: A in faith.” Rushdie, whose novel “The Satanic Challenge for Jews, Verses” famously earned him a “fatwa” from 32 Datebook Iran’s Imam Ruhollah Khomeini and is per- 32 On File Christians and haps the most profoundly atheistic of the three writers in his absolute rejection of God, offers a Muslims critique of a rigoristic view of Islam as “purely a religion of law” that has “done much to Father Patrick J. Ryan, SJ obscure the truth of God’s mercy and love so central to that religious tradition.” Before the What can believers learn from atheists? Islamic tradition ever evolved legal traditions, People of faith sometimes need to see them- said Father Ryan, “the Quran proclaimed the selves as others see them, said Jesuit Father absolute mercy of God at the center of its mes- Patrick J. Ryan, who took up this question sage.” His text follows. in his spring McGinley lecture at Jesuit-run Fordham University in New York. Father Ryan, Jewish atheist, a Christian the Lawrence J. McGinley Professor of Religion atheist and a Muslim atheist May 17, 2012 and Society at Fordham, spoke April 24 at the walk into a bar. …” A friend Volume 42 university’s Manhattan campus and on April of mine has suggested that I Number 2 25 at its main campus in the Bronx. He chose as abegin this lecture with a joke like that but I examples the American Jewish novelist Philip continued on page 18 continued from page 17 novels. Between 2006 and 2010 Roth pub- Respondents to Father Patrick cannot complete it. Perhaps it is sufficient- lished four short novels to which he has Ryan’s McGinley lecture were ly funny that one could describe atheists as assigned a Greek common title: Nemeses, the Rabbi Daniel Polish, spiritual leader of Congregation Shir either being Jewish, Christian or Muslim. English plural of the Greek word nemesis. Chadash in Poughkeepsie, Many atheists might be happier sim- Nemesis in Greek mythology is the hyposta- N.Y., and Amir Hussain, pro- ply to describe themselves as atheists pure sis or goddess of revenge, the fury who repays fessor of theological studies at and simple, without any notice given to the the hubris of human beings, their overween- Loyola Marymount University faith they or their ancestors once professed. ing pride. Three of these novels are excellent; in Los Angeles, Calif. There is in recent years something fashion- about the third and shortest, The Humbling Rabbi Polish argued that able in describing oneself as an atheist. The (2009), the less said the better.2 I will com- Philip Roth’s “atheism” needs New Atheists get advertised and reviewed in ment mainly on two of the three excellent to be understood in a wider context. Jewish identity is The New York Times. Theologians do not. On novels in this series, Indignation (2008) and not fully analogous to either the whole I don’t know whether I find the Nemesis (2010), among the best ever written Christian or Muslim identity. New Atheists or the New Apologists who have by Roth. He explained: taken them on more tiresome. “For both Christian and In this evening’s lecture I want to reflect on Muslim identity depends the work of three very nontiresome writers of “Roth has seldom, if ever, writ- upon faith. … And if one does imaginative fiction in English, all of them liv- not have that faith, or no ten positively about Judaism, but longer has that faith, or aban- ing, each of them distinctly reacting against dons that faith, then one is no the faith of his fathers — and against the faith these two novels prove more than longer Muslim or Christian. of their mothers as well. Those three writers eloquent in their expression of But Jewish identity is not built are the American, Philip Roth, the Irishman, along the same lines. … Colm Tóibín, and the British Indian, Salman rage not only against Judaism but “The religion of that people Rushdie. is Judaism. But the identity also against God.” All at one time or another have outraged is conferred by being part of that people or participating their former co-religionists. I wish to examine in that civilization. So though some of the writings of each of these con- In both of these novels the leading charac- it is conventional to speak temporary writers to see what they criticize ter’s life is reviewed, starting from his child- of Jews as a religious group about their ancestral faith and to interrogate hood in a lower middle-class urban setting in analogous to Christians or what people of Jewish, Christian and Muslim New Jersey. Each character has a tragic flaw Muslims, we are also what faith might learn from those critiques. To this or makes a series of strategic mistakes that can be called an ethnic group … an identity that is full of point, let me quote the Scottish poet Robert lead to his downfall. These novels are not rep- secular implications.” Burns: etitious; the accounts of how the main char- This reality puts Philip Roth acters meet their respective nemeses prove in a different category from O wad some Power relentless. Tóibín or Rushdie, he said. the giftie gie us In each novel the hero (if I may use an old- “So yes, as Father Ryan notes, To see oursels as ithers see us!1 fashioned term) cries out against God and the Roth has written forcefully whole structure of a life based on the faith against G-d, and against the religion of the Jews. But here is The authors involved might question the tradition of Israel. Roth has seldom, if ever, where it gets asymmetrical — existence of that Power, but they can still “gie written positively about Judaism, but these and interesting. I would argue us” that “giftie” themselves. Men and women two novels prove more than eloquent in their that from the very beginning of faith — Jewish, Christian and Muslim — expression of rage not only against Judaism Roth has written as a proudly sometimes need to “see oursels as ithers see but also against God. self-affirming Jew, and lov- us.” Indignation (2008) narrates the brief life of ingly about Jewish life — and not in any sense of former a young man from Newark, Marcus Messner, identity.” Philip Roth: Imagination the son of a kosher butcher and his wife, who Rabbi Rosen said Roth’s Born and Bred in Newark in 1951 escapes the increasing paranoia of engagement with his Philip Milton Roth was born 79 years ago in his father by transferring from a local com- Jewishness and the life of Newark, N.J. Since 1959 he has published 29 muter college in Newark to Winesburg College the Jewish people “runs like a bright thread” through his career. ISSN 0093-609X, Origins, CNS Documentary Service, is published weekly (except biweekly during July, August and December's last week) by Catholic News Service, 3211 4th Street N.E., Washington, D.C. 20017-1100. Copyright © 2012 “What I am arguing,” he said, by Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Periodical-class postage paid at Washington, D.C. “is that from the beginning Editor, Edmond Brosnan; Associate Editor, Mary Esslinger; Layout, Emily Thompson; Director of CNS, Tony Spence. of his career issues of Jewish Editorial: (202) 541-3284. Circulation: (202) 541-3290 - www.originsonline.com. life never seem far from Roth’s mind. Does any of this make Subscriptions: One year, $114; two years, $199; three years, $284; foreign postage additional. Single copy: $8. Back issues: Inquire for availability and rates. Attach mailing label to change of address requests and subscription corre- Roth a theist? Obviously not. spondence. Postmaster: Send address changes to Origins, CNS Documentary Service, 3211 4th Street, N.E., But it does make Roth recog- Washington, D.C. 20017-1100. nizably Jewish in an impor- tant way that Jews under- Documentation in Origins is selected on the basis of interest and usefulness in reference to current issues. Publication does not signify endorsement by Origins or its sponsoring body, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. 18 origins in Ohio.3 Winesburg College, once a Baptist series: Nemesis (2010). The narrator, speaking seminary, is by 1951 a secular college, but in 1971, is a survivor of a 1944 polio epidemic stand what Jewish is.” undergraduates are still required to attend in Newark.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • 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.
    [Show full text]
  • 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.
    [Show full text]
  • 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.
    [Show full text]
  • UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Recuperating The
    UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Recuperating the Bildungsroman in Women’s Contemporary Spanish Narratives and Film DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Spanish by Ana María Palomar Dissertation Committee: Professor Gonzalo Navajas, Chair Associate Professor Laura Hyun Yi Kang Assistant Professor Santiago Morales-Rivera 2015 © 2015 Ana María Palomar DEDICATION To my family whose love and support is endless There are these women’s faces, various as dewprints sequined across my life’s web every grain reflecting a different dawn. The interlace of all my years shudders with such a weight until each pod of moisture bursts, flooding toward the center— that hub of memory, itself unspeakable from which is spoken all that moves us. Robin Morgan, from “The Network of the Imaginary Mother,” Lady of the Beasts ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv CURRICULUM VITAE v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION vi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: Configurations, Causes, and Modes of the Bildungsroman 14 Women and Identity 38 Patriarchal and Cultural Shifts 58 CHAPTER 2: Treating the Erotic: Feminism, Language, and Sexuality Discourses 75 The Quest for Love 99 Dichotomies of Spectatorship 112 Gender Role Displacements 126 CHAPTER 3: Recuperating the Past: Women’s Condition in Post-Franco Spain 135 Progressing Towards Transition 173 CHAPTER 4: Conclusion 179 BIBLIOGRAPHY 182 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my faculty committee, Dr. Gonzalo Navajas, Dr. Laura Kang, Dr. Santiago Morales-Rivera, and other UC Irvine professors for their consistent support and motivation, scholarly excellence, and charm with which they teach.
    [Show full text]
  • Bibliography for the Study of Phillip Roth's Works
    CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Volume 16 (2014) Issue 2 Article 14 Bibliography for the Study of Phillip Roth's Works Gustavo Sánchez-Canales Autónoma University Madrid Victoria Aarons Trinity University 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, 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; and Aarons, Victoria.
    [Show full text]
  • Philip Roth/Nathan Zuckerman/Philip Roth Written/Written/Unwritten" (2015)
    Bard College Bard Digital Commons Senior Projects Spring 2015 Bard Undergraduate Senior Projects Spring 2015 Philip Roth/Nathan Zuckerman/Philip Roth Written/Written/ Unwritten Grayson Gibbs Bard College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2015 Part of the Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Recommended Citation Gibbs, Grayson, "Philip Roth/Nathan Zuckerman/Philip Roth Written/Written/Unwritten" (2015). Senior Projects Spring 2015. 80. https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2015/80 This Open Access work is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been provided to you by Bard College's Stevenson Library with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this work in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Introduction “…and the likeness to him was wonderful.” - Book 23, line 106-7. p. 475. The Iliad. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. “Think of the ventriloquist. He speaks so that his voice appears to proceed fom someone at a distance fom himself. But if he weren’t in your line of vision you’d get no pleasure fom his art at al. His art consists of being present and absent; he’s most himself by simultaneously being someone else, neither of whom he “is” once the curtain is down.
    [Show full text]
  • Secrecy and Self-Invention: Philip Roth's Postmodern Identity in the Human Stain G. Neelakantan, Indian Institute of Technolog
    Secrecy and Self-Invention: Philip Roth’s Postmodern Identity in The Human Stain G. Neelakantan, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur1 Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000), a fitting final part of the novelist’s re- cent trilogy comprising American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998), dramatizes powerfully the interplay of secrecy and self-transformation that determines human identity. Identity in its varied performative guises had always been a central problematic in Roth’s fiction. For a novelist whose works register forcefully the solidity and specificity of the identifiable material world, a characteristic Roth shares with most nineteenth-century realist writers, the de- constructive turn of the narrative in this novel, which calls into question the es- sentialist notions of self, class, and racial identity, inaugurates a radical shift in direction. This decentering principle, not a wholly unfamiliar strategy in Roth’s works, is notably at work in his earlier novels such as The Anatomy Lesson (1983), The Counterlife (1986), Deception (1990), and Operation Shylock (1993). Telling a poignant tale of men and women driven by despair and angst in contemporary multicultural America, The Human Stain focuses on the constitution of identity and difference by negotiating the definition of self and the distortions it is subject to in the perception of the other.2 Interestingly, the Rothian narrator’s self-ap- pointed role in reclaiming the complex identities of his protagonists by ascribing motives to their actions seems hardly objective because ultimately the images he carves of them are constructs of his own imagination. This constructedness of identity in Roth’s fiction, if a typical postmodern discursive practice, not only disengages from the genre’s characteristic reveling in dissipation and disputation of the self, but contrary to all expectations invests the self with the open-ended- ness of reinvention.
    [Show full text]
  • AN INTELLIGENT HEART by Alain Finkielkraut Editions Stock, 2009
    AN INTELLIGENT HEART by Alain Finkielkraut Editions Stock, 2009 sample material translated by Adriana Hunter AN INTELLIGENT HEART sample material translated by Adriana Hunter THE JOKE Reading Philip Roth’s The Human Stain “You know how European literature begins? With a quarrel.” It is with this disconcerting observation that, after calling the register, Coleman Silk used to kick-start his lesson on the gods, heroes and myths of the ancient world. Then, with no further preamble, he would read the first verses of the Iliad to his class: “ Divine Muse, sing of the ruinous wrath of Achilles… Begin where they first quarreled, Agamemnon the King of men, and great Achilles.” And he then drove the nail home: “And what are they quarreling about, these two violent, mighty souls? It’s as basic as a barroom brawl. They are quarreling over a woman. A girl, really. A girl stolen from her father. Abducted under cover of war.” This captive’s name is Briseis. She is Achilles’ concubine, and Agamemnon decides to appropriate her in exchange for the daughter of Chryses, the priest of Apollo, whom he must return to appease Apollo’s anger. A whim versus a soft spot: the quarrel that erupts with the opening song of this magisterial poem is hardly a major one. There is even something trivial about it. Homer’s epic with its heroes, gods and myths, is rooted in the prose of the human condition. The original fable tells us a story that tells us no stories. This introduction to the subject delighted students. By solemnly assigning so un-solemn a beginning to literature, it broke with the numbing protocol of venerating classics, and established a link between the most high-blown works and the most lowly earthly experiences – a link for which nothing and no one had prepared them.
    [Show full text]
  • Indignation Philip Roth Has Written Over 25 Novels in the Past 50 Years
    Indignation Philip Roth has written over 25 novels in the past 50 years, making him one of America’s most eminent authors. With that prodigious output, he has inevitably been scouted by Hollywood for potential adaptations. However, perhaps because of their literary complexity, only a few of his novels have reached the screen, and none has proved a blockbuster. One of them, “Goodbye, Columbus” (1969), won decent reviews and box office, but others—such as “Portnoy’s Complaint,” “The Human Stain,” and “The Humbling”—barely made a ripple. That hasn’t stopped filmmakers from trying: the latest effort comes from writer/director James Schamus who has brought “Indignation,” a Roth novel from 2008, to the screen Much of Roth’s work springs from his biography, albeit with inevitable changes in details and locations. “Indignation,” a coming-of-age story, is certainly triggered by Roth’s own background. The tale is told in one long flashback narrated in over voice by Marcus Messmer (Logan Lerman), who is an infantryman during the Korean War. That voice shifts to 1951, where we observe Marcus as a precocious but inexperienced high school kid from New Jersey. He longs to pull away from his anxious, hovering, working-class family and is able to escape to a school in a new environment, in this case a private Christian college in Winesburg, Ohio. He quickly realizes his isolation among the few token Jews on campus. His youthful, but confident, atheism also clashes with a culture of chapel attendance and invocations of the Lord. Two incidents roil his world: 1) his unexpected sexual initiation from a beautiful classmate Olivia (Sarah Gadon), a “troubled” girl with whom he is smitten, and 2) his confrontations with Dean Caudwell (Tracey Letts), who tests his patience and his personal ethics.
    [Show full text]
  • Roth's Fiction from Nemesis to Nemesis
    CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Volume 16 (2014) Issue 2 Article 10 Roth's Fiction from Nemesis to Nemesis Emily Budick The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 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, 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 Budick, Emily.
    [Show full text]
  • Chrisman Thesis Final.Pdf (600.71
    Marsh’s Field: A Novella and Introduction A Thesis Presented to the Honors Tutorial College, Ohio University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English By James Chrisman This thesis has been approved by The Honors Tutorial College and the Department of English _________________________ Patrick O’Keeffe Professor, English Thesis Adviser ___________________________ Carey Snyder Honors Tutorial College, DOS English ___________________________ Jeremy Webster Dean, Honors Tutorial College 2 Table of Contents Introduction: 4 Works Cited: 46 Marsh’s Field: 49 3 Introduction 4 1—Inspiration & Influence Roth. As a young writer, his record draws me to look up to him as Nathan Zuckerman and his peers looked up to The Suede: like I am a few classes after he has graduated, and his name is still here on the plaques in the halls, to be compared to, to define oneself against, to be discovered when one takes the time to wonder where the awards went. Twenty-nine novels. Two memoirs. Two works of literary criticism. Two National Book Awards (1960, 1995), two National Book Critics’ Circle Awards (1987, 1991), two Pen/Faulkner Awards, the National Medal of Arts, the Pulitzer Prize, the Frances Medici Foreign Book Prize. His works are collected by the Library of America—one of only three living writers with that particular honor. Timothy Parrish suggests, in the Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, that “Roth has been perhaps the most critically significant and consistently controversial American writer of the past 50 years” (Parrish 1).
    [Show full text]
  • O Rigin Al a Rticle
    International Journal of English and Literature (IJEL) ISSN (P): 2249–6912; ISSN (E): 2249–8028 Vol. 9, Issue 6, Dec 2019, 1–8 © TJPRC Pvt. Ltd . SECRECY AND SELF-INVENTED IDENTITY IN PHILIP ROTH’S NOVEL THE HUMAN STAIN KABIDEEPA HANDIQUE Research Scholar, Assam University, Diphu Campus, Assam, India ABSTRACT This paper aims at examining the ambiguous nature of identity in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. It is analysed here how identity of an individual is camouflaged to attain the American Dream. Roth in this novel attempts to bring the plight of two minority community in America by placing them against each other. These two groups are the Jewish American and African American. Roth presents the ambiguous shades of identity in the novel by employing the weaponry of secrecy and self-invention. The desire for a self-invented identity will be analysed with the help of psychological theories and arguments by Karen Horney and Abraham Maslow. KEYWORDS: Identity, Secrecy, Self-Invention, Ambiguous & American Dream Original Article Article Original Received: Aug 05, 2019; Accepted: Aug 26, 2019; Published: Oct 22, 2019; Paper Id.: IJELDEC20191 INTRODUCTION An individual’s negotiation with society at large is to establish the meaning of his or her identity. Identity is a label and both relational and contextual. The meaning of identity varies with reference to various fields of study. Thus Identity can be seen as the distinctive characteristic that channelizes an individual with a larger social category or group. The awareness of one’s identity occurs through one’s identifications with significant others- parents or groups as they are perceived.
    [Show full text]