Operation Shylock: a Confession Free
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1'E L ((~;,:S( ~)O Homelands of the Heart: Israel and Jewish Identity in American Jewish Fiction
.' (~T) , {f;" r( • ',' -~ .- .; /0"1" V( ' ~ .... vi UJ. VY\( .~\(j)-'. .. Li<}J<·~r _ ~_*<t..'" ~ 1.{" ·,,-t ;. f,J. ~:,' ~ I \ OrLh .~' t c.. f.' I'\' ,j '-~ / /\,I \ j --\ J 'A, I ~ .. ,(~ U!..)'I"')1); .-J',.l,.,....\ - \) t"d '.t,·, C".. J .. -.. \'-..:.... ' ..., 1'E l ((~;,:S( ~)O Homelands of the Heart: Israel and Jewish Identity in American Jewish Fiction Sylvia Barack-Fishman f;'his article examines depictions ofIsrael in current American Jewish '-fi~tion, using as a case study Philip Roth's two powerful recent works about Jews and Jewishness, a 1986 novel, The Counterlife, and a 1993 book, billed as "a confession," Operation Shylock-:]Roth's books are fertile examples of the interaction between works of fiction and the social, religious, and cultural trends that surround the writer of fiction. This essay places The Counterlife and Operation Shylock into the context of the current American Jewish environment and illuminates their exploration of the conflicting impact of the State of Israel, Eastern European origin, and America's open economic and social opportunities as factors defining the identity of Jews in the United States today. In exploring Roth's depiction of Israel and Israelis, I focus pri marily on the position of Israel in the American Jewish obsession with Jewish identity. A search for the essence of Jewish identity has become a focal point of contemporary American Jewish literary and intellectual exploration, spanning all brow levels, in works from the most complex fiction to the soap-operatic life-cycle angst of popular films and television programs. Jewish self-definition is salient in different ways to Diaspora writers and readers than it is to their Israeli counterparts. -
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. -
A New Literary Realism: Artistic Renderings of Ethnicity, Identity, and Sexuality in the Narratives of Philip Roth
A NEW LITERARY REALISM: ARTISTIC RENDERINGS OF ETHNICITY, IDENTITY, AND SEXUALITY IN THE NARRATIVES OF PHILIP ROTH Marta Krogh Harvell, B.A., B.A., M.A. Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS May 2012 APPROVED: James Duban, Major Professor Robert Upchurch, Committee Member James Baird, Committee Member David Holdeman, Chair of the Department of English James D. Meernik, Acting Dean of the Toulouse Graduate School Harvell, Marta Krogh. A New Literary Realism: Artistic Renderings of Ethnicity, Identity, and Sexuality in the Narratives of Philip Roth. Doctor of Philosophy (English), May 2012, 154 pp., bibliography, 246 titles. This dissertation explores Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (1959), The Ghost Writer (1979), The Counterlife (1986), The Facts (1988), Operation Shylock (1993), Sabbath's Theater (1995),and The Human Stain (2000), arguing that Roth relishes the telling of the story and the search for self within that telling. With attention to narrative technique and its relation to issues surrounding reality and identity, Roth's narratives stress unreliability, causing Roth to create characters searching for a more complex interpretation of self. Chapter I examines Roth’s negotiation of dual identities as Neil Klugman in Goodbye, Columbus feels alienated and displaced from Christianized America. The search for identity and the merging of American Christianity and Judaism remain a focus in Chapter II, which explores the implications of how, in The Ghost Writer, a young Nathan Zuckerman visits his mentor E.I. Lonoff to find him living in what he believes to be a non-Jewish environment—the American wilderness. -
PDF Download the Counterlife Ebook, Epub
THE COUNTERLIFE PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Philip Roth | 336 pages | 08 Oct 2015 | Vintage Publishing | 9780099481355 | English | London, United Kingdom The Counterlife PDF Book The structure of this book reminded me that while Roth leaves a lasting impression of making our more unseemly side seem more human and even touchingly funny, his real strength as a novelist is the imaginative narrations of his novels. Illuminating these lives in transition and guiding us through the book's evocative landscapes, familiar and foreign, is the miind of the novelist Nathan Zuckerman. Roth covers this territory with biting prose, brilliantly understanding both sides of every argument, voiced cleverly in this ingenious plot line which is a delight in and of itself. Talking about an author's style is acceptable only in the case of an autobiography. No Comments Yet. Despite my feeling relief as I read the last word, I should mention that, during the trip that seemed much longer than it was, I did occasionally come across situations that were funny and remarks that were powerfully phrased -- and just plain true. What does it mean? According to psychoanalytic theory, we find "in the literary work the kind of thing we characteristically wish or fear the most," and we "ward off any potential threat that a narrative poses to psychic equilibrium" Martin Jimmy reveals that he has smuggled a gun and a grenade onto the plane. Gil Gamesh, the only pitcher who ever literally tried to kill the umpire. Nathan is sent to Israel by Carol to persuade Henry to return to his family. -
Black Blood/Red Ink: Fact, Fiction, and Authorial Self
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository BLACK BLOOD/RED INK: FACT, FICTION, AND AUTHORIAL SELF- REPRESENTATION IN VLADIMIR NABOKOV’S LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS! , MARGUERITE DURAS’ L’AMANT DE LA CHINE DU NORD , AND PHILIP ROTH’S OPERATION SHYLOCK: A CONFESSION David C. Phillips A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature of Chapel Hill 2012 Approved by: Dr. John McGowan Dr. Inger Brodey Dr. Erin Carlston Dr. Eric Downing Dr. Diane Leonard ©2012 David C. Phillips ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT DAVID PHILLIPS: Black Blood/Red Ink: Fact, Fiction, and Authorial Self-Representation in Vladimir Nabokov’s Look at the Harlequins! , Marguerite Duras’ L’Amant de la Chine du Nord , and Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock: A Confession (Under the direction of John McGowan) In the past several decades, a new class of hybrid texts seems to have emerged: texts characterized by both 1) autobiographical referentiality, and 2) intertextual relations to earlier fictive works by the author. Such texts pose a variety of problems for their readers as well as for literary critics and theorists—problems revolving around a number of inter-related issues that coalesce around two primary questions: 1) How are such works to be read and interpreted?, and 2) What do the author’s strategies of self-representation in such works reveal about the relations between their fiction and their lives? Answers to the first question may be arrived at through a consideration of various theories of fiction as both a discursive mode and a distinct literary genre—particularly the theory of fiction advanced by Gregory Currie in The Nature of Fiction , which defines fiction as a communicative act according to issues of authorial intentionality. -
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. -
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. -
11 Article 43 in LCPJ Philip Roth and His Jewish Problem Abstract The
Shehu, Erion 2014: Philip Roth and his Jewish Problem To be downloaded from www.lcpj.pro Article 43 in LCPJ Philip Roth and his Jewish Problem Abstract The article addresses the issue of the Jewish problem in Philip Roth’s fiction, through which, relying on contemporary monographs and critical studies, we seek to prove that the label of a “self-hating Jew” is totally erroneous and out of touch with the reality, and that his compelling fiction provides and ensures his position as one of the greatest living American writers. Key words: Jewishness, holocaust, Philip Roth, identity, counterlives, goy, diaspora. Introduction Of all contemporary American writers, Philip Roth is arguably the most ambitious and hailed as America’s best living novelist. Unlike many aging novelists, whose productive qualities wane over time, Roth has demonstrated a unique ability not only to sustain his literary output but even to surpass the scope and talent inherent in his previous writings. His work has garnered every major American literary honor including the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, a Pen/Faulkner Award and many more. His portrayal of the common man, not as a Jew but as a universal human being and his assault on the American experience, Philip Roth has always tried to explore the deepest recesses of the American Jews and how they have evolved and adapted to the American experience during the second half of the 20th century. Known for having reinvented himself throughout his career, Philip Roth’s work quintessentially portrays the life of American Jews and stands as an introspection of America itself. -
(GIGI) FENSTER a Thesis Submitted to the Victoria University
FEVERISH SELF-INDUCED FEVER AND THE CREATIVE MIND BY GIOVANNA (GIGI) FENSTER A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Victoria University of Wellington (2016) ABSTRACT This thesis is a hybrid work that combines the critical and creative components of the Creative Writing PhD in a novel, Feverish. It includes notes, an afterword, and a full bibliography. Feverish is a novel narrated by Gigi, a writer who wishes to induce a fever in herself. The thesis aims to present more than a fictional account of a quest for fever. It aims, rather to travel with the mind of the protagonist. Gigi is not exclusively engaged in quest-related transactions in her present. Her interest in fever moves her to consider events from her past and her upbringing in Apartheid South Africa. It reminds her of a teenaged fascination with brain fever in Wuthering Heights. It prompts her to research fever-related aspects of psychiatric history and Jewish history. It drives her to research the law on consent to self-harm. As Gigi’s interest in fever leads her to these and other topics, so the thesis follows her, so the form adapts. In both its form and its content, Feverish presents a view into a mind. It provides glimpses of the events that shaped the mind. It describes where the mind goes when in the single-minded grip of a quasi-fever. The novel contains strands of theory, memoir, creative non-fiction, ficto-criticism. These different forms are layered upon each other. -
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. -
American Pastoral / Philip Roth About the Book…
American Pastoral / Philip Roth About the Book… Seymour "Swede" Levov comes of age just after World War II, in a thriving and triumphant America. A legendary high school athlete, the diligent and successful inheritor of his father's glove factory, the proprietor of an eighteenth‐century stone house in the heart of WASP country, the devoted husband of a beautiful and intelligent wife, and the father of a charming daughter, the Swede appears to have fulfilled the ambitions of generations of struggling forebears. But his carefully constructed life begins to collapse as he and America face the challenges of the turbulent sixties, and he sees his adored daughter, Merry turn, first into a rebellious adolescent and then into a revolutionary terrorist. As Swede Levov watches in bewilderment everything he treasures, everything so industriously created by his family over the course of three generations, is blown up by an angry girl's bomb. American Pastoral is a wrenching and cathartic piece of work. It is a book about America: about loving and hating it, about wanting to belong and refusing to belong. About the Author… Philip Roth was born in 1933 in Newark, New Jersey, and was brought up there. He received a B.A from Bucknell University, and an M.A. in English from the University of Chicago. He then spent two more years at Chicago, teaching and pursuing further graduate studies. His first book, Goodbye, Columbus, was published in 1959 and received the National Book Award, the first of many literary prizes including another National Book Award (for Sabbath's Theater), the National Book Critics Circle Award (for Patrimony and The Counterlife), the PEN/Faulkner Award (for Operation Shylock) and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral. -
Reverse Anti-Semitism in the Fiction of Bellow and Roth
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Volume 16 (2014) Issue 2 Article 4 Reverse Anti-Semitism in the Fiction of Bellow and Roth Jay L. Halio University of Delaware 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 Halio, Jay L.