‘Calling a halt to your trivial thinking’: Philip Roth and the Canon Debate

Abstract

Philip Roth’s engagement with the canon wars of the 1980s and 90s has been much discussed, but there has so far been little agreement on how to define his intervention within the wider debate. This article focuses on The Human Stain , where questions about the value of classic literature and the politics of representation are raised very explicitly. It argues that Roth challenges the distinctively Emersonian frame in which the canon debate took place in America, by placing it in relation to a more Francophone emphasis on the relation between art and the sacred.