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Philip Roth As the Jewish American Writer in American Fiction

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Philip Roth As the Jewish American Writer in American Fiction “HE FREQUENTLY TURNS OUT TO BE YOU”: PHILIP ROTH AS THE JEWISH AMERICAN WRITER IN AMERICAN FICTION by MIRANDA EVE COOPER Jeffrey Israel, Advisor A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Jewish Studies WILLIAMS COLLEGE Williamstown, Massachusetts May 13, 2016 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements..........................................................................................................................2 Introduction......................................................................................................................................4 Chapter 1: The Jewish American Writer as a Rothian Creation......................................................6 Critical Perspectives on the Jewish American Writer..........................................................6 The Jewish American Writer in Non-Jewish Literary Culture..........................................19 Roth’s Jewish American Writer: Introduction...................................................................22 The Dual Phallic Anxiety of Roth’s Jewish American Writer..........................................25 Roth’s Jewish American Writer as Literary Son...............................................................34 Roth’s Jewish American Writer as Philip Roth.................................................................41 Chapter 2: Roth’s Ghost (Writer)s: Contemporary Portrayals of the Jewish American Writer....58 Introduction........................................................................................................................58 Ensuring a Future for the Jewish American Writer: Legacy..............................................60 Listen Up Philip.................................................................................................................67 Sam Apple Imagines Philip Roth Imagining Philip Roth: “The Butcher of Desire”.........71 Conclusion.........................................................................................................................84 Chapter 3: Challenging “The Father of Us All:” One Implication of the Roth Character.............86 Literary Daughters?: The Jewish American Writer as Woman.........................................86 Elisa Albert “Tear[s] a Page from the Roth Playbook”.....................................................93 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................102 Conclusion...................................................................................................................................104 Bibliography................................................................................................................................106 Appendix of Images.....................................................................................................................110 1 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank Professor Jeff Israel, without whom my knowledge of and passion for Jewish American fiction likely would not exist, and without whom this thesis definitely would not exist. For opening my world to this rich world of literature, encouraging me to pursue my passions, pushing me to be a better writer, often knowing what I wanted to express before I quite knew it myself, and usually appreciating my puns, I am enormously grateful. I truly cannot imagine my time at Williams without the support, intellectual challenge, and laughter that Professor Israel has provided me over the past two and a half years. Thanks also are due to Professor John Limon, who has known me from the start and has watched my love of American fiction grow and change over the years. It is only fitting that a professor so integral to my Williams experience should be able to participate in this process, and I am delighted to have had him as my ever-thoughtful second reader. To Professors Liz McGowan, Jim Shepard, Magnus Bernhardsson, Alexandra Garbarini, Justin Crowe, Catherine Howe, Emily Vasiliauskas, and all the others who have guided me in various ways and seen me through this process, I am extremely grateful. I am indebted as well to Josh Lambert for sharing with me both his considerable insight into the world of Jewish American fiction and his incredible mental repository of relevant sources. Most notably, I thank him for pointing me to Elisa Albert’s story, which gave me so much, both intellectually and personally. Thanks are due also to Daniel Goldfarb for sending me his unpublished script and allowing me to use it in my thesis, Joshua Cohen for his direct insight into the world of contemporary Jewish American writing and for the address I will maybe one day build up 2 enough courage to use, and Eric Sundquist for supplying me with additional sources about Philip Roth’s representation of the Holocaust. I am thankful for the unending support of my friends. Ranana Dine has been with me every step of the way, and I could not have done any of it without her encouragement and insight (thanks for letting me share your thesis advisor). I am indebted as well to my dear friends Cristiana Wurzer, Evan Ringel, Kayla Shore, Jessica Bernheim, Annabel Coleman, Elizabeth Dunoff, Marissa Levin Shapiro, Abraham Kirby-Galen, and Avishai Gebler for their wonderful friendship, support, advice, and willingness to hear me rant and rave about Philip Roth on a near- daily basis throughout this process. And, of course, to the Cooper-Siegel clan, for steadfast patience, tolerance, support, and love. I would, quite literally, be nothing without you. 3 Introduction Who or what is “the Jewish writer?” In 2016, The Jewish Writer is a large-format coffee- table book featuring glossy black-and-white photographs of seventy-five different Jewish writers.1 Fiction writers and poets are featured alongside critics and essayists, and many are pictured at their writing desks. It is significant that in this book, the Jewish writer’s image, and not his or her (arguably more individual and characteristic) writing, is the focal point: the photographs are accompanied by short blurbs about each writer, but the book is largely visual (indeed, it is the work of a photojournalist). Before the mid-twentieth century, however, “the Jewish writer” was hardly a category substantial enough to merit essays and anthologies, let alone an object of popular decor. As Sanford Pinsker notes, “One can turn the 1,000-plus pages of the first edition of The Literary History of the United States (1948) without encountering a single Jewish-American fictionist.”2 By the mid-1960s, however, that had changed drastically, and now, in the early part of the twenty-first century, one is hard-pressed to find an anthology of twentieth century American fiction that does not devote considerable space to the likes of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Bernard Malamud. So what changed? How did “the Jewish writer” come to be such a recognizable image, and for that matter, how did he come to earn a definite article? The burgeoning definition of the Jewish American writer was transmitted through many channels in the 1960s and 1970s: popular culture (such as Truman Capote’s infamous statement), literary and intellectual culture (such as essays by Karl Shapiro, Irving Howe, and Alfred Kazin), representations by non-Jewish writers (such as John Updike’s Henry Bech stories) and, most interestingly and impactfully, in works written by Philip Roth, himself a Jewish American writer on the rise. Roth participated in the cultural discourse surrounding the Jewish American writer 1 Jill Krementz, The Jewish Writer (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1998). 2 Sanford Pinsker, Jewish American Fiction 1917-1987 (New York: Twayne, 1992), ix. 4 by using his fiction to encourage its canonization as a specific character—at times a caricature— possessing not only the traits that critics had noted but additional characteristics of his own. These characteristics were quite literally his own: he shaped the Jewish American writer in his own image. This was one of his most interesting achievements in this context, and has certainly had a lasting effect on Jewish American fiction. Images of Roth—to use the obvious trope in Roth scholarship, Roth’s “ghost writers”—continue to populate contemporary fiction; several Jewish American writer characters in short stories, films, and plays happen to closely resemble Philip Roth (when they are not explicitly identified as such). This is undoubtedly a mark of the success of Roth’s fictional project of making the Jewish American writer a character, in all senses of the word, and of tying that character inextricably to himself. That Roth has made himself a giant in Jewish American fiction is undeniable. But what are the implications of his influence—specifically, his influence on the Jewish writer character and his casting of himself in that role—for contemporary writers? In what ways does it serve as a signpost for the future of Jewish American fiction, a future whose viability has been doubted by critics for decades? 5 Chapter I: The Jewish American Writer as a Rothian Creation Critical Perspectives on the Jewish American Writer In the 1960s and 1970s, the proliferation of American literary fiction by Jewish writers propelled a flurry of essays among cultural and literary critics of the time, including Karl Shapiro, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe. Their critical pieces—with titles like “The Jewish Writer in America” and “The Jew as American Writer”—introduced this
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