Introduction: Writers Who Write About Roth

Abstract

IntroductionWriters Who Write About Roth Miriam Jaffe (bio) Please excuse that I must be brief here, for we have delightfully reached the edges of our permissible word count, but any summary of this special issue is so much less valuable than the experience of the whole. When the editors asked me to prepare a special issue ahead of the Society's 2023 conference, "Roth@90," we landed on the theme "Writers Who Write About Roth." I believe this volume delivers on that theme with variety. From my perspective as a literature scholar turned social scientist, my hope was for the issue to serve as an archive that would help tell the stories of the Society and our passionate work. The first several essays represent writers who write about Roth in the vein of traditional scholarship. Ira Nadel's work on Roth and poetry gives an explanation to why I've always been, first and foremost, drawn to Roth for the cadence of his syntax. Nadel's piece was made possible, in part, by the new Philip Roth archive at the Newark Public Library and thereby ushers in a new era of Roth Studies. As part of that new era, scholars James Duban and Brittany Hirth contend with Roth's reputation among allegations of what Duban calls "sexual deviancy." After these pieces, Andy Connolly and Louis Gordon combine traditional scholarship with personal reflection, describing how their identities foundationally influenced their academic approaches to Roth. Continuing with the phenomenological approach, Debra Shostak and Victoria Aarons offer a deep conversation about their lived-experience as Roth scholars; then, an outpouring of Roth-inspired trajectories, from the current Society President, Matthew Shipe, as well as a network of writers from around the world who are drawn together through writing about Roth's writing: Gustavo Sanchez Canales, Martyna Bryla, and Pia Masiero from Europe, and Gurumurthy Neelakantan from India. Together, they catalog something important about what matters in Roth Studies across continents. Finally, since we opened this call to all writers who write about Roth, we were delighted to receive the personal narratives of Ross Berger, a creative writer and video game designer, and the novelist [End Page 5] Alexandra Marshall, who will be featured as a keynote speaker during our Roth@90 conference. I'd like to thank Aimee Pozorski and Maren Scheurer for their preface, which sets the collegial tone of this issue, as well as for the opportunity to edit this special issue ahead of the Roth@90 celebration in my home state of New Jersey, and in my ancestral home of Newark. This volume is a celebration in its own right, a love letter from the Roth Society to Roth and to each other. [End Page 6] Miriam Jaffe Miriam Jaffe, Phd (English), MSW, has been teaching at Rutgers University since 2001. Her Roth publications focus on autobiographical gestures, automortography, narrative medicine, Black-Jewish relations, and gender. A New Jersey native and Roth Society program director, Miriam is engaged in projects with the Philip Roth Library at the Newark Public Library. Copyright © 2023 Purdue University