Editor's Column

Abstract

Editor's Column Derek Parker Royal In the editor's column of the last issue of Philip Roth Studies, I speculated on the relative popularity of various Roth texts in the classroom and in reading groups, pointing out that if the scholarship was any indication, most current readers and instructors are probably privileging the novelist's most recent works. In fact, a cursory survey of the essays published in this journal since its inaugural issue in 2005 illustrates this tendency. Roughly 66% of Roth's fiction that has been discussed in Philip Roth Studies concerns works published since the early 1990s. What is more, 63% of those articles—and 42% of the entire six-volume run so far—has focused on The Human Stain (2000), The Plot Against America (2004), and American Pastoral (1997), and in that order. (In a curious anomaly, the novel that many critics consider to be Roth's masterpiece, Sabbath's Theater [1995], has been the subject of only one essay.) As I suggested in the previous issue, there is a need for someone to conduct a thorough survey of educators in order to learn what Roth novels they are using in the classroom. Such a study would surely give us a revealing snapshot of the current pedagogy surrounding Roth studies. But if the scholarship tells us anything, it is perhaps safe to assume that most readers are focusing on the recent historically framed novels. Indeed, the essays in the current issue could stand as vivid illustration of this development. They revolve around two of Roth's most discussed novels, The Plot Against America and The Human Stain. In the first contribution to this issue, Christopher Vials reads The Plot Against America alongside Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here (1935), and he does so by arguing that both texts articulate what he calls "dissonant antifascism." This, according to the author, is a critique of the exclusionary and nationalistic rhetoric that has come to define conservative politics, both in Lewis's time and in our own. As Vials argues, both Roth's and Lewis's novels are significant because they are written from liberal, and not from strictly leftist, perspectives, both highlighting the right-wing nature of fascist ideology. In this way, Vials's analysis furthers the discussion over Roth's alternate history as an inherently political text, complementing [End Page 5] the works of earlier critics such as Martin J. Jacobi, Dan Shiffman, Steven G. Kellman, and Gurumurthy Neelakantan (all of whose essays have been published in these pages). In his treatment of The Plot Against America, James Duban takes an entirely different approach. Instead of focusing on the political resonance in Roth's book, he investigates its autobiographical import. Specifically, he reads the novel within the context of Meyer Levin's first autobiography, In Search (1950), seeing in the latter an inspirational blueprint for Roth's handling of Judaism and his relationship with it. Duban's contribution picks up from his earlier work on The Plot Against America, published in our Fall 2010 issue, where he contextualized the novel as a Melvillian/Ahabian response to Jewish self-doubt and anti-Semitism. Yael Maurer, too, resists a strictly political reading of The Plot Against America and instead undergoes a more psychological investigation. Using Freud's concept of the uncanny as a springboard, she explores the tropes of dreams and hallucinations and reads Roth's alternate history as a sophisticated and ongoing mental engagement with "the Jewish condition." The final two essays of this issue shift our attention to the earlier novel. Larry Schwartz approaches The Human Stain in light of its racial import, yet he argues that race is not really what the novel is about. Instead, he reads Coleman Silk's story—filtered through the artist figure, Nathan Zuckerman—as one of creation. Similar to the ways that Zuckerman conjures his fictional worlds, Coleman Silk constructs a life that is entirely his own and attempts to control the ways in which it is interpreted by others. In this way, Zuckerman's framing of the outraged classics professor says more about the act of creative invention than it does about racial politics. And in...