Editors' Note:Traveling with Roth Aimee Pozorski and Maren Scheurer This note begins not with text as one would expect from the editors of Philip Roth Studies, but with an image—an image Maren snapped seven years ago in Oradea, Romania, as Aimee delivered a paper at one of our several Roth Society sponsored international gatherings that members of the Philip Roth Society hosted over the years. What is interesting about the image is not Aimee standing at a podium, but an overblown sketch of Philip Roth projected on the screen behind and above her, staring stoically at the conference attendees, or maybe looking over Aimee's shoulder in judgment of what she is about to say next. While taken at a very specific time and place—July 16, 2015, at Partium Christian University in Oradea, Romania—the image testifies to our experiences as co-editors throughout the last four years. When we say that we "Travel with Roth," we do not simply mean that Roth's works, and Roth's sensibility itself, are always with us—although that is also true. It is no exaggeration to say that at some point during every day, we have Roth on our minds—what he would say about our editing choices, how he might disagree with our takes on various issues surrounding his catalog, whether we are doing right by his legacy. But, when we say we are travelers with Roth, or traveling with Roth, we also mean that traveling the world in pursuit of Roth Studies has been one of the greatest joys of the last ten years. Click for larger view View full resolution We met at the Roth@80 conference. It is difficult to believe that was ten years ago: ten years of collaborating, supporting, commemorating, mentoring, conversing, deliberating, and commiserating. The occasion of our meeting seemed fortuitous. Philip Roth had orchestrated a collaboration between the Philip Roth Society and the Newark Preservation and Landmarks Committee to plan his eightieth birthday party, complete with the Weequahic High School Marching Band and tributes by leading thinkers and authors of our time. While much of that celebration has been described at length, one of our goals for this issue, [End Page 1] as we mark what would have been Roth's ninetieth birthday, is something much less considered: the legacy of the occasion itself. Gathered in Newark, New Jersey, on March 18 and 19 of 2013, were dozens of young Roth scholars, and some not so young Roth scholars, who made a commitment in the name of Roth to keep the conversation going. Pia Masiero was the first, a leader in our field in so many ways, bringing Roth scholars together in Venice, Italy, before that celebratory event in Newark. Then came Velichka Ivanova and Rémi Astruc at the Université de Cergy-Pontoise, uniting Roth scholars in France in 2012. After Roth@80, Claudia Franziska Brühwiler was the next to make the offering: she would host the following international conference in St. Gallen, Switzerland, where we picked up many more travelers and continued our travels around the globe. Then came Oradea, Romania, with Enikő Maior, then New York City, and so on down the line. Even when we were not able to travel in person, during the heights of the pandemic, we traveled in spirit, accepting the invitation of Professor Majeed Jadwe to give a joint digital talk at University of Anbar, Iraq. Traveling to such very different venues, and encountering Roth scholars from around the world, signifies something more than our individual wanderlust or even the vibrant activity of the Philip Roth Society. It says something about Roth as a "traveling author," as it were, whose work speaks to readers and scholars from backgrounds very different from the contexts within which we generally situate Roth. In Romania, we learned how Roth's depictions of antisemitism resonated with the national tensions in postwar, post-Soviet Eastern Europe, and in our conversations with Iraqi scholars, we discovered how much hope they put into the liberatory force of Roth's writing. That we are convening once again in Newark, New Jersey, a decade later, the significance of it all is...
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Oct 1, 2024
Haley Liptrap + 6
Open Access