Ross Posnock Research Articles

Politics, Aesthetics, and the Critical Humanities: Revisiting an American Tradition?—An Interview with Ross Posnock1

Ross Posnock is Anna S. Garbedian Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, where he studies and teaches US and European literature and intellectual history. Ross Posnock was Andrew Hilen Professor of American Literature at the University of Washington before teaching in the English department at New York University from 2000 to 2004. From 1998 to 2017 he was series editor of Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press) and is a contributing edit...

Ross Posnock, Renunciation: Acts of Abandonment by Writers, Philosophers, and Artists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2016), 415 pp

Ross Posnock, Renunciation: Acts of Abandonment by Writers, Philosophers, and Artists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2016), 415 pp

Ross Posnock, Renunciation: Acts of Abandonment by Writers, Philosophers, and Artists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2016), 415 pp

Ross Posnock, Renunciation: Acts of Abandonment by Writers, Philosophers, and Artists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2016), 415 pp

Renunciation: Acts of Abandonment by Writers, Philosophers, and Artists by Ross Posnock, Exhaustion: A History by Anna Katharina Schaffner

Book Review| August 01 2018 Renunciation: Acts of Abandonment by Writers, Philosophers, and Artists by Ross Posnock, Exhaustion: A History by Anna Katharina Schaffner Posnock, Ross, Renunciation: Acts of Abandonment by Writers, Philosophers, and Artists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 415 pp.Schaffner, Anna Katharina, Exhaustion: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 291 pp. Miguel Tamen Miguel Tamen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2018) 24 (3): 447–448. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-6940366 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Miguel Tamen; Renunciation: Acts of Abandonment by Writers, Philosophers, and Artists by Ross Posnock, Exhaustion: A History by Anna Katharina Schaffner. Common Knowledge 1 August 2018; 24 (3): 447–448. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-6940366 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsCommon Knowledge Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2018 by Duke University Press2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century eds. by Marc C. Conner and Lucas E. Morel

Reviewed by: The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century eds. by Marc C. Conner and Lucas E. Morel Michael Germana Marc C. Conner and Lucas E. Morel, eds. The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2016. 360 pp. $27.85. Ralph Ellison's œuvre and scholarship on his life and work have each grown considerably since his death in 1994. Previously uncollected and/or unpublished essays and works of fiction by Ellison have appeared in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (1995), Flying Home and Other Stories (1996), an edition of the Book II typescript of Ellison's unfinished second novel, Juneteenth (1999), Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (2000), and the most complete version of Ellison's second novel manuscript yet to be assembled, Three Days before the Shooting… (2010). Interest in Ellison among literary scholars has similarly increased in recent years. As a consequence, more books and essays about the author have appeared since the turn of the millennium than were published in the preceding five decades. Twenty-first-century scholarship on Ellison hasn't been entirely encomiastic, however. A small but influential chorus of critics remains fixated on the author's shortcomings, whether real or imagined, as a writer and an activist. Foremost among these critics are Arnold Rampersad and Barbara Foley whose critical works, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (2007) and Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (2010), respectively, express disillusion with, if not disappointment in the author. Together, they make a Procrustean bed for the National Book Award winner. Foley contends that Ellison, the author, abandoned a more pointed (and, in her estimation, more empathetic) materialist critique in Invisible Man when he revised the novel into its published form. Rampersad, by contrast, faults Ellison, the man, for not being expansive enough in his social interactions with and encouragement of black artists and intellectuals. Each takes a negative and fundamentally myopic view of the author's life and work. Foley dismisses Ellison's shift from proletarian realism to "depoliticized mythic individualism" (83) as a sellout to Cold War liberal ideology in general, and to its literary critical adherents in particular. Rampersad, in turn, (ab)uses Ellison's social calendar to draw misleading inferences about the author's perceived lack of political engagement, and to suggest that Ellison was too busy smoking cigars in the Century Club and currying favor with powerful whites to fulfill a legacy that the publication of Invisible Man (1952) ought to have inaugurated. Marc C. Conner and Lucas E. Morel's The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century constitutes a collective rejoinder to these views—views that, as Robert Butler and Ross Posnock show in their contributions to the collection, dogged Ellison even at the pinnacle of his success. Rather than take the author to task for what could or should have been, the volume's contributors portray Ellison as a visionary, not only of the post-segregation period, but also of twenty-first-century American society and culture. The result is an ambitious collection of essays that, in the esteem of its editors, "represent the most far-reaching and original assessment of Ralph Ellison's entire career and body of work ever published" (30). [End Page 151] This is a bold claim, but it is also an accurate one. Indeed, The New Territory is an important work of Ellison scholarship that evinces a generosity of scope, sense of possibility, and complexity of analysis befitting of the author's corpus. It promises to do for Ellison's reputation what Foley and Rampersad have done to it. The fourteen essays that comprise the collection are, with the exception of John Callahan's speculative but rewarding conclusion, divided into three parts: one on new approaches to Invisible Man, a second on Ellison's unfinished second novel, and a third on Ellison's transhistorical view of American culture. The collection is worth obtaining for the essays on Three Days alone. Here, for the first time, is a substantial cross-section of work by scholars earnestly grappling with Ellison's unfinished tome, posthumously...

Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry by Ann Marie Mikkelsen

Reviewed by: Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry by Ann Marie Mikkelsen Terence Diggory (bio) Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Ann Marie Mikkelsen. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. x + 244 pp. $110.00 (hardcover). The concept of pastoral that Ann Marie Mikkelsen applies to twentieth-century American poetry is more an ideological position than a literary mode. The key formulation derives from William Empson's Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), with regard to the "double attitude of the artist to the worker, of the complex man to the simple one ('I am in one way better, in another not so good')" (Empson 14; Mikkelsen 9). Set parallel to this formulation is the task that the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey undertook in Art as Experience (1934): "to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience" (Dewey 3; Mikkelsen 34). Establishing continuity—between artist and worker, between art and everyday experience—is a condition of "creative democracy," as Dewey understood it, and as Mikkelsen understands the progressive politics that she associates with both modernist pastoral and pragmatism. In a succinct acknowledgment of her allegiances, Mikkelsen explains in an endnote: "I generally understand pragmatism to entail a democratic, progressive agenda, as is suggested by [Robert B.] Westbrook and [James T.] Kloppenberg in addition to a number of literary critics including Frank Lentricchia, Cornel West, Ross Posnock, and Giles Gunn" (183 n37). The presence of William Carlos Williams in this lineage is suggested by the title of Gunn's book Thinking Across the American Grain (1992), which echoes Williams's In the American Grain (1925), although Gunn does not discuss Williams directly. Given Mikkelsen's reliance on Dewey as the most "politicized" of the pragmatist philosophers (16), the previous study of Williams that most closely aligns with her aims is John Beck's Writing the Radical Center: William Carlos Williams, John Dewey, and American Cultural Politics (2001). However, Mikkelsen objects to Beck's characterization of Williams as "nostalgic," contradicting her emphasis on the "progressive" stance that she believes Williams and Dewey share (75). Although Mikkelsen makes some unpersuasive attempts to identify pastoral rhetoric in the writing of Dewey and William James, for the most part [End Page 168] she wisely looks to the poets to carry the pastoral burden in the progressive movement she envisions. In addition to Williams, she focuses on Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery, devoting a separate chapter to each. A concluding chapter glances at Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian and Lisa Robertson, offering just enough gender contrast to throw into higher relief "the romance of masculine individualism" (163) that Mikkelsen finds to be both perpetuated and contested in her male poets. "Romance" is a very broad category while "pastoral," in most critical usage, is more restrictive. In her effort to argue that her poets engage in questions of identity from a specifically pastoral perspective, Mikkelsen runs into some trouble, particularly in the chapters on Frost and Stevens. Each of these chapters treats a recurrent figure in the poetry, the tramp in the case of Frost, and in the case of Stevens, a "fat" personage who appears in various guises, such as the "fat Jocundus" of "The Glass of Water" (1938; Stevens 197). The idea is that such figures occupy marginal positions in society, like the shepherd of classical pastoral, and that the poet's engagement with them becomes an occasion for that double comparison identified by William Empson: "I am in one way better, in another not so good." Indeed, Mikkelsen suggests that such engagement transforms the poet's own identity to make it more fluid, more open to the full range of experience that Dewey valued. But one may grant these consequences without granting that they result from an operation that is specifically pastoral. A relation of sympathy between the poet as insider and a social outsider may be a necessary condition for pastoral but it is not sufficient. Other relationships are involved, including the outsider's relationship to the world in which he is placed, a world that in turn is outside, somehow...

The Place of the “Aesthetic” in <em>Zuckerman Unbound:</em> Roth's Conversation with Kierkegaard

Philip Roth's frequent references to other writers create links that expand themes of each novel. intertextual relationships are part of a larger history, which begins to be a universe itself within its own world.One of these worlds, which will be focus of this article, is established through Roth's conversation with Kierkegaard his novel Zuckerman Unbound (1981).1In his introduction to Crisis Life of an Actress and Other Essays on Drama Kierkegaard's translator, Stephen Crites, reminds us of meaning of word aesthetic ancient Greek, which will also be a useful starting point for us as we go deeper into Kierkegaard's and Roth's explorations of term. Aesthetic, in its most comprehensive sense, is derived from verb ... which means literally 'perceive,' 'apprehend by senses,' 'learn,' 'understand,' 'observe' (Kierkegaard, Crisis 21). definition guides us to see how, according to Kierkegaard, each novel we experience what is apprehended by senses and what is perceived most of time by characters so that this experience can be transferred to readers. In addition, novels have atmosphere, musicality, and rhythm, and this is why, Kierkegaard's reading of literature, all novels can be considered aesthetic. importance of such moods, perceptions, and constant observations will later explain why Kierkegaard defines some of his own writings as aesthetic- even if aesthetic his world has multiple significations that are still debated among Kierkegaard scholars today.2The idea of a larger world made by connections between authors and their works and works to which they allude can be linked to what Ross Posnock calls Roth's cosmopolitanism. Posnock explains this epithet when he writes that, as Greek for 'world citizen' [it] is rarely a neutral term and often pejorative because it usually involves a refusal to revere local or national authority and a desire to uphold multiple affiliations (6). In his view, is better understood an international context (3), and he points out: The main effort of [Philip Roth's Rude Truth] is to construct these frames of reference, using them as a resource for literary criticism of fiction, and making vivid Roth's creative engagement with a rich lineage of intellectual history (3). Posnock argues that this cosmopolitanism evades fixed identities (4), a point with which I would agree.Taking lead from Posnock, this essay considers overlapping frames of reference a careful reading of one connection, conversation that undertakes with Kierkegaard Zuckerman Unbound. In so doing, it will reveal the rich lineage of intellectual history carried forward by Kierkegaard and continued by Roth. One of main focuses of Kierkegaard's work is how singularity is created and how one can live with oneself by oneself.3 To achieve this purpose, according to Danish philosopher, one has to be free of a fixed mind, a state of being that seems to achieve via his very conversation with Kierkegaard.However, Roth's bounds can also be seen his books terms of what Pia Masiero, Philip and Zuckerman Books, calls a storyworld. Here she explores possibilities of reading that Roth's novels offer to readers. Consequently, this article focuses on this storyworld and pays particular attention to effect of reading on reader. This ambitious and ambivalent story, which is created both by readers and by Zuckerman, is also an world within itself.As Masiero describes playful relationship that has with Zuckerman, Roth projects onto his favorite alter ego burdens and pleasure of authorship; that is, of actual making of fictional worlds to be engaged and apprehended by an audience (11). Later, she explains that Zuckerman typically mirror[s] his being-crucially-an author whose work revolves around deft blurring of boundaries between what is imagined and what is real through a careful handling of order and presentation of events. …

Breaking Down Creative Democracy: A Pragmatist Reading of Race and Gender in Nella Larsen's Quicksand

Breaking Down Creative Democracy:A Pragmatist Reading of Race and Gender in Nella Larsen's Quicksand Gregory Alan Phipps (bio) Caustic, controversial, and frequently cynical about racial politics, Nella Larsen worked simultaneously with and against prevailing tendencies in the Harlem Renaissance. She supported Jessie Fauset and W.E.B. Du Bois's disparagement of primitivism and exoticism, but, unlike Fauset, she did not ally the figures of the New Negro and New Woman with bourgeois morality. Her first novel, Quicksand (1928), features a biracial female protagonist who occupies a series of disparate communities, pursuing beauty, luxury, romance, and autonomy. However, repetitious collapses into alienation and despair compromise the potentially affirmative side of her cosmopolitan mobility. Numerous scholars have noted that Larsen modeled Helga Crane's story in part on her own experiences, although the conclusion of the novel seems to diverge from her life. As George Hutchinson remarks, at the time she was writing Quicksand, Larsen was "working her way into circles where she felt valuable, understood, and at home, and these circles defied the constraints of racial, gendered, and sexual entrapment" (238–39).1 Her protagonist, on the other hand, never finds this kind [End Page 135] of community, ultimately fleeing to the rural south, where she lives in a homogenous African-American environment as a preacher's wife. Most critics consider this conclusion not just a break in the autobiographical trajectory of the novel but also a break in the continuity of the narrative. Conversely, this article argues that Helga's fate in Alabama grows directly out of the relationship between belief, doubt, and experience that frames preceding events in her life. Focusing on a neglected point of connection between Larsen's social context and Helga's migrations, the article notes that the relationship between belief, doubt, and experience invokes several foundational principles in the intellectual movement of pragmatism. Pragmatism developed in the early twentieth century into the paramount school of philosophy in America, influencing some of the most important communities Larsen occupied in the years leading up to Quicksand. The novel reflects and reworks integral pragmatist theories from the writings of John Dewey and Charles Peirce, providing a uniquely black feminist case study in pragmatism's articulation of the intimate connection between individual experience and democracy. Du Bois praised Quicksand, calling it the "best piece of fiction that Negro America has produced since the heyday of [Charles] Chesnutt" ("Two Novels"), but critics such as Cheryl Wall and Ross Posnock have questioned how well Du Bois understood the novel.2 Posnock maintains that in praising Helga Crane as a character Du Bois ignored the "extremity and risk of her primitivism," misconstruing her as an "antirace race woman" (85). To be sure, it is difficult to read Quicksand as a narrative about the rejection of primitivism, considering it concludes in rural Alabama with Helga suffering through multiple pregnancies. After revolving among various locales that are full of educational, artistic, and intellectual sophistication, Helga lands in the type of setting that authors in the Harlem Renaissance tended to associate with so-called "authentic" black primitivism. As a result, Quicksand transforms in the final chapters from a "cosmopolitan novel of manners" into a depiction of a "painful series of grotesque bodily disasters" (Stringer 82). Some critics have tended to [End Page 136] find this conclusion disturbing, if not inexplicable—a "baffling narrative cul-de-sac" (Karl 137). As a social commentary, the novel seems to imply that an intellectual and artistic biracial woman living in early twentieth-century America will fail to find a satisfactory niche in cosmopolitan and urban settings. At the same time, the novel also revises some of the familiar themes associated with the "tragic mulatto." After all, part of the problem for Helga is she is unable to find contentment in either predominantly black or white social environments. Several scholars have discussed how Larsen reworks the figure of the tragic mulatto, affording her protagonist more autonomy and independence in the process—although Helga does not acquire enough freedom to escape her fate.3 Analyses of Helga's inability to settle into any social environment usually intersect with topics of repetition and cyclicality. As Dorothy Stringer states...

What Henry Gave to William

What Henry Gave to William Hannah Wells Upon reading William James’s Pragmatism in 1907, Henry James wrote to his brother, “I was lost in the wonder of the extent to which all my life I have unconsciously pragmatised” (qtd. in Perry 428). Expressing more adoration than consent, Henry’s praise of his brother’s work seems to outpace his comprehension of it. “I can’t now explain,” he writes, “save by the very fact of the spell itself (of interest and enthrallment) that the book cast upon me; I simply sank down, under it, into such depths of submission and assimilation that any reaction, very nearly, even that of acknowledgment, would have had almost the taint of dissent or escape.” Noting this correspondence, Ralph Barton Perry provides a pithy summation of the intellectual relationship between the two brothers: “Henry let William do his philosophizing for him” (429). Two years later, after reading William’s A Pluralistic Universe, Henry would again write to his brother: “It may sustain and inspire you a little to know that I’m with you, all along the line—and can conceive of no sense in any philosophy that is not yours!” (qtd. in Perry 428). Suffused with awe, Henry’s praise is both an affectionate act and a statement of submission, a gift of himself that also gives philosophy to his brother. This confessional stance is a consistent feature of Henry’s work. The younger brother communicates with the elder less through reciprocal dialogue than through narratives given, stories of the self. Appropriating Henry’s most affirming statements about William’s philosophical work, a number of scholars read the fiction of Henry in the light of William’s pragmatist philosophy. Framing pragmatism as a formative impulse for literary innovations of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, these critics tend to present Henry’s fiction as a practical extension of William’s pragmatism. Ross Posnock’s The Trial of Curiosity, most notably, identifies a pragmatist aesthetic exemplified by The American Scene.1 In addition to this work’s groundbreaking reading of Henry’s late prose, Posnock’s study provides a critical lens through which the praxis of pragmatism might itself be understood as an aesthetic. The result (in Posnock’s work and [End Page 34] elsewhere) is an increasingly refined description of Henry’s aesthetic engagement with modernity that doubles as a description of the liberatory potential associated with pragmatist philosophy. Extending this logic, more recent scholarship incorporates work by writers as diverse as Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Wallace Stevens, finding in pragmatism a philosophical matrix that is especially useful for isolating formal continuities in American literary history while dispensing with those older models of literary inheritance that seek to streamline and consolidate national and cultural traditions through the implication of homogeneity.2 Emphasizing pragmatism’s embrace of the particular as a mode of resistance to ideological certainty, identity politics, and imperialist aggression, these projects tend to elaborate on Posnock’s original claims. Henry, the argument goes, is a more pragmatic pragmatist than his elder brother, fulfilling William’s call by abandoning William’s nostalgia for a willful, cohesive self. What if we were to reverse this narrative, focusing instead on what Henry gave to William? Rather than reading Henry’s most experimental prose as fulfillment of the impulse that inspired philosophical pragmatism, what if we were to find in Henry’s prose a more self-conscious, even critical, response to the philosophical conclusions of his brother? To do so is to raise questions about pragmatism and its legacy as well as the younger brother’s aesthetic practices. Rather than using one to account for the other, this line of inquiry places Henry’s prose and William’s philosophy in contemporaneous and generative relation to one another. It also makes visible the extent to which many of the protagonists of Henry’s late short stories, particularly the ones he wrote in the decades before and after The American Scene, have at least as much resemblance to William as they do to Henry. Posnock’s reading of Henry’s embrace of modernity is masterful, particularly its emphasis on the...

How Nineteenth‐Century Literature Got Its Nerve Back

How Nineteenth-Century American Literature got its Nerve Back Donald E. Pease (bio) The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Justine Murison, Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, gen. ed. Ross Posnock. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. 215. $90.00 cloth. The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature was published in Ross Posnock’s Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture series at Cambridge University Press. Unlike the other contributors to this series, Justine Murison situates her work at the cusp of a recent neuroscientific turn embraced by a new generation of scholar-critics intent on supplementing rather than replacing psychoanalytic interpretive paradigms. Murison stakes the interpretive politics of Politics of Anxiety on the revival of a nineteenth-century discourse of nervous physiology that prefigured psychoanalysis. After locating the historical origins of the neurocognitive turn in nineteenth-century understandings of nervous physiology, Murison demonstrates how this pre-Freudian discourse challenges prevailing assumptions about psychology and affect in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary scholarship. Rather than restricting her project to this biopolitical turn, however, Murison mines the nineteenth-century scientific archive to proliferate historical angles from which to approach nineteenth-century American literature. According to Murison, the nineteenth-century precursors of the neuroscientific turn shared with their descendants the desire to find evidence-based perspectives from which to explain the anxious, nervous artifacts called literary texts. [End Page 139] The Politics of Anxiety engages complexly with the discourse of nervous physiology to show how it structured nineteenth-century narratives of national history and social life. Murison specifically explains how American authors and readers responded to questions about heredity, self-possession, freedom, sexual desire, and biological determinism by exploring pre-Freudian explanations of the nervous system. In the nineteenth century, the nervous body replaced the previous model of the relation between mind and body as regulated by the fluid exchange of the humors. As the repository of antebellum American culture’s basic psychosomatic assumptions, the discourse of nervous physiology exerted widespread physical, as well as metaphysical, influence. The nervous system it described was believed to govern the body and the body politic by exposing both to environmental vicissitudes. Perceived as a system of dynamic interaction with its environment that demanded constant physiological adjustments, nineteenth-century American society was understood to be nervous because it was fraught with the power to change, yet utterly dependent upon an anxious body politic. Nineteenth-century American culture was an era of somatic ethics and nervous politics. Somatic nervousness supplied nineteenth-century artists, politicians, social scientists, historians, reformers, and physicians with a lens to inspect the physiological imperatives structuring moral, spiritual, and political struggles. These imperatives could not be explained as biologically determined because the aberrant physiology of the nervous system resisted such universalizing claims. Although the discourse of nervous physiology endowed soma with anxious significance, the precise workings of the nervous system remained a mystery to scientists and physicians, as well as their patients. This lack of certitude facilitated discourses about the nervous system that were expressive of diverse, even contradictory, explanations and opinions. Confusion surrounding the nervous physiology and the lack of agreed-upon criteria for the certification of physicians made it difficult to distinguish scientifically verifiable medical practices from pseudoscience and sheer quackery. Unlicensed until the 1870s, the field of medicine included “irregular” practitioners—homeopaths, Grahamites, phrenologists, botanical Thomsonians, mesmerists, table tappers, hydropaths, and spiritualist mediums. Physiological terms for the nerves—which included “sympathy,” “animal electricity,” “the nervous fluid,” and the “odylic principle”—became truly ubiquitous only when they entered the idiom popularized within newspapers, journals, fictional tales, and novels. [End Page 140] In The Politics of Anxiety, Murison reads across an archive spanning literature, medicine, politics, and popular culture to show how the notion of the nervous self assumed hegemony by finding its way into Putnam’s and The Democratic Review and United States Magazine, theological debates about spirit bodies, phrenology, homeopathic medicine pamphlets, mesmeric procedures, abolitionist and domestic ideologies, gothic tales, political satires, city mystery novels, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, spiritualists’ rationales for prescribing water cures, calisthenic manuals, how-to-books in electrical psychology, animal magnetism instruction, fictional accounts of phantom...

I'm Not There

ROSS POSNOCK, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2009, is the Anna Garbedian Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. His books include The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James and the Challenge of Modernity (1991), Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (1998), and Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity (2006). Perhaps, like me, you have a propensity to collect books without quite knowing why. Over the years I have piled up books by and about, say, Ludwig Witt genstein, Hannah Arendt, George Santayana, Philip Roth, Ad Reinhardt, Philip Guston, Franz Rosenzweig, Penelope Fitzgerald, Thomas Bernhard–and not only not read them, but have no desire to do so. I have kept busy working on other things. And for a decade or two at a time, these texts simply gather dust on my shelves. But then, inevitably, I am drawn to these nearly forgotten volumes and, strangely, they prove pivotal to a new project: I recall, for instance, that Santayana ascended, literally, from the obscurity of a low shelf to earn a chapter in my book on William and Henry James. Wittgenstein made an analogous, if more circuitous, journey from the shadows, waiting untouched, until 1⁄2ve years ago when I kept a long-held inner vow to read an other languishing tome, one that had stared me down so often it had acquired an aura of intimidation: Stanley Cavell’s The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy. It was indeed intimidating, but also inspiring: that experience opened the door to more Cavell–and to deeper engagements with Emerson–and to Wittgenstein, who has joined the sage of Concord as a central 1⁄2gure in my current project on writers, artists, and philosophers who renounce their careers. The peculiarities of this manner of book buying– the absence of full consciousness and the long gap between acquisition and reading–puts me in mind

Improvisation and the Making of American Literary Modernism (review)

Reviewed by: Improvisation and the Making of American Literary Modernism Ed Pavlič Improvisation and the Making of American Literary Modernism. By Rob Wallace. New York: Continuum, 2010. In his Improvisation and the Making of American Literary Modernism, a deft and skillful close listening to the works and experiences of canonical modernist poets Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens, Rob Wallace (a professor of literature and a drummer as well) intercedes in a vexed field of collaboration. He attempts to realign the terms of the conversation between poetry and jazz, and to understand improvisation as a discipline—not just, as it has been pejoratively understood (under the shadow of racism), as loose or arbitrary play. [End Page 152] In structure and principled intent, Wallace's intervention recalls no book to my mind more than Frank Lentricchia's classic study Modernist Quartet. As a method, Wallace's work more expertly answers Henri Lefebvre's inimitable call for a textual/contextual rhythmanalysis. Drawing tactfully on recent critical readings and theories of Marjorie Perloff, Ann Douglas, Philip Pastras, Michael North, Paul Gilroy, Aldon Nielsen, Derek Bailey, and others, Wallace attempts to position the act and ethics of "improvisation" as a kind of instrument attuned to a loose theory and method "that can be seen both in a given artist's work and in the life of that artist" (18). The book seems to jettison (to the good, I think) a formalized system of modernist improvisational theory and practice derived from the work and lives of Pound, Hughes, Stein, and Stevens, and their critics. Wallace instead achieves a brilliant and tactful method of listening to the work of these writers as each reaches for their unique sense of sense. I n this way, I think Wallace has exemplified improvisation at its very best, as a crucial (rather than narrowly critical) method of literary listening that aims to ambulate its way far nearer and down closer to the sonic and sensual contours of poetry than academic, theoretical readings often do. Wallace's improvised method of readings keeps one brush on the snare while accenting and shading the works he attends in ways that make us see them (even in their blurriest precision) clearer and hear them better. Within the site of Wallace's hearing, William James's rhythmic pragmatism sounds the ur-rhythms of American literary modernism. Echoing Ross Posnock's The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity, Wallace associates the work of each of his quartet of poets with James's lead in "defining how modern consciousness relates to the pulse of life" (75). In his reading of Stevens' long poems, Wallace credits James for the sense of "ambulatory thought" in his approach to Stevens as well as in Stevens' own approach to poetic method. He goes on: "But this ambulatory thinking takes on special significance for Stevens's poetry when we consider the amount of actual walking he did, and that he often composed his poems while walking" (144). In his reading of Stevens' "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," a poem so thoroughly composed in its march of tercets, Wallace comes up with a reconception of improvisation that covers his method as well as the subjects of his readings: My reading of the poem as improvisational is based in the more nuanced notion that improvisation itself does not necessarily lead to the exclusion of a desire for certainty. Improvisation itself can never be "pure," and nor can "pure poetry" or a "supreme fiction." Part of the misunderstanding about improvisation across the arts is that non-improvisers often regard it as a magical [or, I would add, a strictly musical] process at best, or a purely free, intuitive, and messy process at worst. But as Sun Ra consistently reminds us, there is a discipline in freedom, and freedom in discipline. (146) [End Page 153] By this subtlety, Wallace's readings walk us back to an open-ended encounter with the sound-sense in the works of Pound, Hughes, Stein, and Stevens. If there is a shortcoming to Improvisation and the Making of American Literary Modernism, it is the somewhat too direct (and so reductive) link between...

Violent Places: Three Years in Europe and the Question of William Wells Brown’s Cosmopolitanism

Violent Places: Three Years in Europe and the Question of William Wells Brown’s Cosmopolitanism Martha Schoolman (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Tintern Abbey. Engraving by D. Cox, from Wanderings and Excursions in South Wales . . ., by Thomas Roscoe (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), facing 149. [End Page iv] This essay aims to unfix William Wells Brown from what has become his accustomed critical role as an under-examined nineteenth-century avatar of the democratic and integrationist aspirations of liberal cosmopolitanism. It argues instead for reinterpreting Brown as a dialectical thinker of the limitations of a cosmopolitanism that would equate the transcendence of place with the transcendence of race. Taking as my subject what would seem to be the least promising of Brown’s works for such an inquiry, his formally rough but intellectually germinal second autobiography Three Years in Europe: Places I have Seen and People I have Met (1852), I consider the means by which Brown transforms the acts of “seeing” and “meeting” into a productive critique of the kind of political imaginary that would wish to elevate the pleasures of circulation over the challenges of solidarity. In a recent account of the resurgence of cosmopolitanism in cultural studies, Amanda Anderson offers the following general definition: “cosmopolitanism endorses reflective distance from one’s cultural affiliations, a broad understanding of other cultures and customs, and a belief in universal humanity.” “In the twentieth century,” she continues, “I think we can fairly say that it is defined against those parochialisms emanating from extreme allegiances to nation, race, and ethnos. In very recent defenses of cosmopolitanism, the ethnos rhetorically reaches [End Page 1] to include any identity politics conceived along the model of the ethnic enclave.”1 In other words, cosmopolitanism today is best apprehended in spatial terms as “endorsing” a geography of identity cast as a geography of selective disidentification. To be cosmopolitan, that is, means to cultivate a broader frame of reference than the place or people of one’s origin—to view in relative and even ironic terms what one’s purported fellows deem natural and unworthy of comment. This interest in cosmopolitanism both as a contemporary critical stance to be assumed and a past critical stance to be recovered has surfaced across fields and periods, from Anderson’s Victorian studies, to British literary modernism, to political philosophy, to African and South Asian studies, to name a few prominent examples.2 However, critics have differed about whether to consider the cosmopolitan position as necessarily elite or popular, Western or non-Western, flowing with or against capital, or by definition spanning or even obviating such binary distinctions. In U.S. American studies of the last decade or so, however, it is the African American intellectual of the pre-Civil Rights era who has emerged as the category-spanning cosmopolitan figure par excellence. Making in essence a cultual virtue of a political tragedy—of deracination, of limited access to citizenship and national belonging—the African American intellectual finds forms of detachment, reflection, and higher cultural synthesis that out of choice or out of necessity transcend local attachments, whether such attachments be defined in relation to the plantation, the neighborhood, the region, the nation, or the race. In its most salient current critical formulation, African American cosmopolitanism shares the characteristic North Atlantic geography of elite cosmopolitanism. Drawing inspiration from Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, U.S. critics Ross Posnock and Elisa Tamarkin have treated the transcendence of the local as generally synonymous with transit from the ethnic enclaves of the U.S. to the cosmopolitan cities of Europe. In Europe, Gilroy argues, the African American artist discovers the broader frame of black identity as figuratively oceanic rather than parochial, and learns to embrace the Enlightenment intellectual tradition as a common rather than exclusively [End Page 2] white inheritance.3 Taking as emblematic W. E. B. Du Bois’s presence in France during the Dreyfus Affair, Posnock traces the development within African American letters of the Europeanized cosmopolitan category of the intellectual as a figure able to transcend racial identity and overcome the “segregation” of aesthetics from politics imposed on the more conventional figure of the “race man.”4...

100 years of pragmatism: William James's revolutionary philosophy

Citation and Reference Abbreviations Introduction: 100 Years of Pragmatism 1. James's Pragmatism and American Culture, 1907-2007 / James T. Kloppenberg 2. The Enemies of Pragmatism / Mark Bauerlein 3. The Earth Must Resume Its Rights: A Jamesian Genealogy of Immaturity / Ross Posnock 4. Pragmatism and Death: Method vs. Metaphor, Tragedy vs. the Will to Believe / William J. Gavin 5. William James's Pragmatism: A Distinctly Mixed Bag / Bruce Wilshire 6. The Deconstruction of Traditional Philosophy in William James's Pragmatism / Richard M. Gale 7. James on Truth and Solidarity: The Epistemology of Diversity and the Politics of Specificity / Jose M. Medina 8. Pragmatism, Nihilism, and Democracy: What Is Called Thinking at the End of Modernity? / James Livingston 9. Active Tension / Linda Simon 10. Reflections on the Future of Pragmatism / Ruth Anna Putnam 11. Looking Toward Last Things: James's Pragmatism Beyond Its First Century / John J. Stuhr List of Contributors Index

A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein (review)

Reviewed by: A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein Andrew Epstein Joan Richardson. A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 327 pp. $29.99 (paperback). Stretching from the typological thinking of the Puritans to trends in contemporary cognitive science, Joan Richardson’s A Natural History of Pragmatism is nothing if not ambitious and wide-ranging. Warmly acknowledging some of the ground-breaking scholars who have gone before her (like Richard Poirier, Stanley Cavell, Richard Rorty, Louis Menand, and Ross Posnock), Richardson jumps headlong into the lively conversation these figures have initiated about American pragmatist philosophy and its relation to American literature over the past couple of decades. In true pragmatist fashion, Richardson sees this rich body of work as a provocation rather than a settled account that exhausts the subject. The next turn of the screw she offers to our understanding of the pragmatist lineage is to connect this crucial American outlook to revolutionary developments in modern science, arguing that American philosophy and literature cannot be separated from a whole set of new ways of understanding the natural world those scientific discoveries brought about. Previously the author of the definitive two-volume biography of Wallace Stevens, Richardson tests her premise by examining a roster of authors—Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Henry James, Wallace Stevens, and Gertrude Stein—that will be familiar from earlier studies of pragmatism and its legacies. All the players in this batting order, for example, were treated in the chapters of Jonathan Levin’s 1998 book The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism, and studies of pragmatism by Poirier, Giles Gunn, Frank Lentricchia, and others have frequently dealt with these figures in one permutation or another. Picking up where these others have left off, Richardson’s book deepens our understanding of pragmatism, its sources and its ramifications. In particular, and of specific interest to scholars of Henry James, she usefully expands upon other recent studies, like Levin’s, that have explored the profound connections between the intellectual projects of William and Henry James. This is a book about the history of ideas that insistently takes the long view. Richardson sets out to track the often subterranean flows that move across a far-flung, variegated landscape, a terrain that encompasses an interesting and sometimes surprising set of landmarks that extend beyond the group of authors mentioned above: the Puritans, John Locke, Sir Isaac Newton, Jonathan Edwards, Emanuel Swedenborg, Emerson, Charles Darwin, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, Henry James, Alfred North Whitehead, Stevens, and Stein, as well as twentieth-century scientists like Niels Bohr, Francis Crick, Daniel Dennett, and Oliver Sacks. In order to make her case that a persistent, enriching dialogue between scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic [End Page 87] discourses has been overlooked in our understanding of pragmatism and American literature, Richardson’s method is to take a quotation from, say, Gertrude Stein, cast backwards to find premonitions of it in Jonathan Edwards or Darwin and forward to locate its fruition in the findings of a late-twentieth century speculative biologist. This sort of bricolage allows Richardson to offer a revealing new map of American literature and philosophy, showing that the evolution of American thought and writing depends upon the intertwining of scientific knowledge and literary experiment. At the start, Richardson contends that the harsh, bewildering “multifariousness of the New World situation” forced Americans into “stretching the inherited language to describe the new facts and to accommodate the fact of feeling in meeting them” (x). “Under the pressure of new natural conditions,” she observes, “new linguistic forms emerge” (13). In other words, the exceptional material conditions that greeted Americans led writers and intellectuals to push the boundaries of language, thought, and form in order to provide their fellow pioneers with a more adequate description of the strange place in which they had found themselves. Provoked by “the strangeness of the New World environment,” they developed a pragmatist attitude towards language, perception, consciousness, and belief, not to mention towards the natural world itself (2). But these writers didn’t only intuit in a general or...

Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity (review)

Reviewed by: Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity Jay L. Halio Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity, by Ross Posnock. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 301 pp. $29.95. Professor Ross Posnock has written a very learned and stimulating critique of Philip Roth's fiction. Unfortunately, some readers, especially in Britain, may find his title and subtitle misleading or even off-putting. By "rude," Posnock does not mean coarse or obscene, as the English use the term; and he uses "immaturity" in a special sense, defined throughout the book. Neither term is meant as a disparagement in any sense; on the contrary, Posnock extols Roth's achievement, placing his fiction in a tradition that includes Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays, Whitman's poetry, and Dostoevsky's novels. Surprisingly, even Henry James is one of Roth's progenitors, but not in the way many of us are used to recognizing. The James that Posnock refers to is the author of The Portrait of a Lady, specifically to "the antiescapist imperative of immersion that Isabel Archer enacts" (p. 12). The first epigraph to Posnock's book, from Emerson's essays, gives a good indication of this critic's approach: "I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the truth in all ways." The second epigraph, from Witold Gombrowicz, is rather more cryptic and alludes to Posnock's subtitle: "If you are repelled by immaturity, it is because you are immature." Posnock's thesis holds that Roth rejects "the renunciations required by adulthood" (p. 4) in favor of an immaturity that is "disrespectful of dogma, authority, bounded form—all that insulates one from a more open, less censored engagement with the moment" (p. 11). The immaturity that Roth displays in his work is "ludic, seeking not to dominate but to enter the turbulent flow of what Emerson calls 'counteraction' and Roth will call 'counterlife'" (p. 11). Although Posnock considers Roth's oeuvre "one vast text," with each book necessarily read within and against the larger whole (p. 21), as would be true of most serious writers, he does not attempt to study each text chronologically or in equal depth. Instead, he says he will work in a "free spirit of appropriation." Well and good. His analyses of the major novels he treats are both thorough [End Page 198] and insightful and fully demonstrate the validity of his thesis. Some of his linkages are especially fruitful; for example, his analyses of Goodbye, Columbus and American Pastoral to his discussion earlier in Chapter 3 of American Jewry. I was similarly struck by his discussion of Theodore Herzl's "dream" and its relation to both The Counterlife and Operation Shylock. I am unaware of any other critic who has drawn on that particular connection. In his treatment of Sabbath's Theater, but also The Dying Animal, Posnock draws on Dostoevsky. He says: "For Roth, Dostoevsky's embrace of chaos and caprice includes the novelist's affinity for his evil characters" (p. 161). But this is not to claim that any of Roth's protagonist's are inherently evil; rather, that "Dostoevsky is Roth's great predecessor in self-incrimination" (p. 161). In the same chapter he links Mickey Sabbath and Walt Whitman: "In [his] uneasy mix of moods and impulses, and in his porous, leaking, lustful self, holy man Sabbath is soul mate of another New Jersey wanderer—Whitman, especially the poet of 'As I Ebb'd With the Ocean of Life'" (p. 159). Sabbath, of course, never explicitly mentions Whitman, as Posnock notes, but he "shares his ear for the cries of the dead" and "his capacity to mourn" (p. 159). Roth's exuberance (my word, not Posnock's) may suggest a rhapsodic quality that is hardly evident in Roth's prose, certainly not in his later novels, whatever we might say of Portnoy's Complaint. This may suggest a contradiction inherent in Posnock's thesis, but a contradiction that, on careful scrutiny, is more apparent than real. Roth is after all a consummate craftsman. His description of E. I. Lonoff in The Ghost Writer "turning sentences around" is an apt description of Roth's own serious concern...

Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity (review)

Reviewed by Ranen Omer-Sherman University of Miami Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity. Ross Posnock. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. xx + 301. $29.95 (cloth). In recent years, there have been a number of very worthy book-length studies of Philip Roth, including Elaine Safer's Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth (2006), Debra Shostak's Philip Roth—Countertexts, Counterlives (2004), and Mark Shechner's Up Society's Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth (2003). Comprehensive volumes of essays addressing Roth's [End Page 592] entire oeuvre have also lately appeared: Tim Parrish's The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth (2007) and Derek Parker Royal's Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author (2005). In the light of this prolific scholarship (much of it exemplary), it is important to state at the outset that Ross Posnock's study may be the most intellectually complex as well as fiercely independent study of Roth's career to date. At its very best, Posnock's intellectually and imaginatively resonant study of "the art of immaturity" can seem both astonishing and somehow absolutely right. Filled with deft observations, this critical study offers authoritative readings of literature and society which have profound implications that exceed considerations of Roth, its ostensible solitary subject. A staunch Americanist, Posnock's previous works include books on Henry and William James as well as important essays on Ralph Ellison and other African American writers. But here he exhibits a breathtaking ease with an eclectic range of figures (the Frankfurt school, numerous East European writers) that enables him to firmly situate Roth in the cosmopolitan tradition in ways that will likely have a lasting influence on Roth scholarship. In essence, Posnock explains in an elegant formulation that "immaturity" serves the artist as "a vehicle for the exploration of moral fantasy" (38). In the context of Roth's novels, he sees this paradigm expressed through variations on the following: "Freedom from being the good boy, freedom to discover and sublimate in art the anarchic and unsocialized parts of the self—all this requires an undoing of 'maturity,' a wounding of the responsible adult self . . . This process of letting go or undoing defenses defines Roth's creative economy" (38). Posnock is wonderfully attuned to the fact that, especially in Eastern Europe, a milieu that has had a powerful impact on Roth's skeptical imagination, creative immaturity also has profound political stakes, expressing its perverse resistance to totalitarian culture through "love of agonistic combat and rude truth" (9). It staunchly refuses "utopian thinking" and the illusions of "pastoral and idylls" in all their regressive forms. Posnock's introductory chapter begins brilliantly, casting us immediately into the soaring cadences of one of Roth's characters' uninhibited litanies of outrage, as if to establish his sheer pleasure in the novelist's verbal exuberance. Like most Roth critics of late, Posnock is suitably impressed by the fact that, unlike the oeuvres of so many major novelists whose late works lack the ambition and energy of their best days, Roth's most powerful works have emerged in his later years: "This is unprecedented . . . Roth is now beginning to deserve comparison with what is usually regarded as the summit of late turns of novelistic genius—Henry James's major phase at the start of the century" (5–6). In this chapter, Posnock takes immaturity very seriously indeed, cogently tracing its surprising and subversive cultural permutations from the Renaissance through early modernism up until the contemporary novel. At the same time, sensitive to the fact that the privileges of "immaturity" have considerable gender implications (since it is generally allied with a masculinist avant-garde temperament), the author zealously defends Roth against enduring charges of misogyny, pointing out the "depth of characterization" apparent in a wide range of important female protagonists, including Lucy Nelson of the underrated early novel When She Was Good, Michelle Cowan in Sabbath's Theater, and the poignant figure of Faunia Farley in The...

"Get Your Map of America": Tempering Dystopia and Learning Topography in The Plot Against America

Ever since Neil Klugman speculated in the opening pages of Goodbye, Columbus (1959) that the drive up to the hills of the Newark suburbs might bring closer to heaven, Philip Roth has made the frustration of longings for utopia of his major themes. (1) Especially since his American trilogy, Roth's critics have been rightly preoccupied with his application of anti-utopian and anti-pastoral thinking to increasingly large swaths of American history, his critique of what Ross Posnock identifies as his characters' drive to exist in mythic yesteryear, creating national fantasy. (2) The American trilogy critiques postwar cast of, as Murray says in I Married Communist (1998), utopianists. These include believers in socialism like Murray's brother Ira, but also non-ideological dreamers like Ira's wife Eve, whose desire for the perfect home needs, according to Roth, a dose of life's (3) Swede Levov's hope for domestic stability in American Pastoral (1997) calls for similar dose. Roth always insists on making messy experience overwhelm any attempt to retreat to an absolving locale: Faunia's dirty mop water and Les's violent mind give the lie to the pure and peaceful image, as The Human Stain (2000) ends, of fisherman alone on lake constantly turning over its water atop an Arcadian mountain in America. (4) But though (as Nathan Zuckerman emphatically concludes in Communist) [t]here are no utopias and (as his wife does in The Counterlife) [t]he pastoral is not your genre, Roth has not developed in his work the seemingly most natural counterlife to utopia, dystopian social order. His turn to the pogroms and pro-Nazi Lindbergh presidency of The Plot Against America (2004) does seem to signal such deployment of the dystopian. (5) But it turns out that dystopia isn't Roth's genre either; some purity is mixed in with the dung. For all the perpetual fear it evinces, The Plot, in its concentration on familial strength and resilient boyhood consciousness, depicts an unexpectedly limited and tempered dystopia, dwelling less on American Nazis and Jewish persecution than on the sentimental idealization of his childhood Newark as an inviolate haven that Roth confessed to in The Facts (1988). (6) I argue here that Roth's neutralizing refusal to grant either utopian or dystopian extreme full sway leads him to newly enriched interest in the simply topographical. The Plot mediates its dark materials of global conspiratorial plotting and race hatred by illuminating child's more mundane and localized acts of plotting--his participatory mapping of his surroundings and his out-of-school education in how to regard the vast nation of which he knows himself to be part but which he cannot fully fathom (101). Following on Roth's well-established interest in illiterates learning to read, young Philip undergoes an initiation into cartographic literacy, term I borrow from historian of geography David Matless, who links it to the modern subject's mature conception of citizenship. (7) Engaging dramatic political extreme of the sort his work has so often scrupulously avoided in depicting the U.S., Roth re-investigates the discursive means by which home links to homeland in the American mind. Dystopian fiction tends to demonstrate the and between utopian and dystopian perspectives, according to Erika Gottlieb's comparison of dystopias from democracies and totalitarian states between 1920 and 1991. [E]ach dystopian society contains within it seeds of utopian dream. (8) Kristan Kumar writes in similar vein that anti-utopia and dystopia are one side of dialogue of the self with individuals who have been indelibly stamped with the utopian temperament. (9) Roth, an inveterate idealizer of the meaning of America but also dogged critic of such idealization, seems to fit this psychological type, Gottlieb's push and pull of opposites correlating loosely with the anti-myth[s] of counterlives so many of his characters construct. …

Talking about Philip Roth

Talking about Philip Roth Elaine M. Kauvar (bio) Timothy Parrish , ed., The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xi + 179 pp. $75.00; $27.99 paper. Ross Posnock , Philip Roths Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. xx + 301 pp. $29.95. Controversy arises in the wake of every new book Philip Roth publishes. From the very beginning of his career, the novelist has earned praise; but he has never eluded censure. In 2002 he was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2005 he became the third living American writer to be included in the Library of America. Yet if not dissension, then contention still excites the reactions literary critics and general readers have to Roth: they respond passionately to his work, deeming it either an extraordinary achievement or else an egregious display of narcissism. The appearance of two recent critical books on Roth's career testifies to the disputes sparked by his work. The collection of essays The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, edited by Timothy Parrish, continues the "critical conversation" (7) on Philip Roth. However, Ross Posnock's Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity takes Roth criticism to a new realm, as Posnock discloses that Roth's eschewal of the consistency belonging to maturity and his espousal of the rudeness inhering in immaturity engender the truth the novelist is unafraid to reveal. Two great traditions promote the art of immaturity to which, Posnock believes, Roth subscribes: the American one that consists of Emerson, Melville, and Henry [End Page 613] James and a twentieth-century one that includes Eastern European writers like Milan Kundera. Such a discovery situates Roth not in the narrow category of American Jewish literature but in the pantheon of American letters. This conviction rests on the central issues Parrish locates at the core of Roth's work: "intertwining personal and communal identities, sexual politics and practice, the postmodern world and the place of America in that world, self-invention in the context of human annihilation and acts of terror, and racial and cultural pluralism," in short, the "realities of American culture" (3). The essays in The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth attest to Parrish's view, for they reflect the disparate approaches critics bring to Roth's work, affirming its contradictory and complex nature. What these essays also make apparent is how keenly author and reader interact and how robustly Roth's critics continue to debate the meaning of his work. Victoria Aarons's essay, "American-Jewish Identity in Roth's Short Fiction," begins the critics' conversation in the Cambridge collection. It is Aarons's contention that Eli Peck's obsession with his identity as a Jew in "Eli, the Fanatic" epitomizes Roth's protagonists, who constantly wonder "how Jewish is too Jewish?" (13). Having suppressed his own Jewish identity and reinvented himself as a Jew who is acceptable to Gentiles, Eli leads what Roth later calls a "counterlife," or what Aarons identifies as an "alternate reality" (10) contrived to avoid being a Jew. Like the rest of the characters in Roth's short fiction, Eli Peck exposes the ambivalence besetting the Jew in America after the Holocaust. The source of Roth's idea of a counterlife, Eli is as obsessed with Jewish identity as are all the characters in Goodbye, Columbus. The process of determining our identities, Derek Parker Royal avers, attaches Philip Roth more to intertexuality and metafiction than to a literary patrimony. Royal's essay, "Roth, Literary Influence, and Postmodernism," makes plain that ascertaining the influences on Roth's texts is unavailing. Without apprehension of its intertextuality, Roth's work, he argues, is simply incomprehensible. Royal draws on Michael Riffaterre's definition of intertextuality as "the perception of similar comparabilities from text to text," like the references to James's Portrait of a Lady that undergird the opening [End Page 614] pages of Roth's Letting Go.1 It is their reliance on intertextuality and the metafictional themes of the novelist's texts, not the simple identification of his sources, that illumine the hidden chambers of Roth's fiction. Showing us...

Making Jews, Making Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Identity

A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song. By Jeffrey Melnick. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. 277 pages. $29.95 (cloth). $16.95 (paper). The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America. By Jonathan Freedman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 264 pages. $45.00 (cloth). In his 1955 book Protestant-Catholic-Jew, the sociologist of religion Will Herberg commented on the post-World War II rise in synagogue membership, particularly "In the smaller towns and in the suburbs." He noted that: In the city, living in a "Jewish" neighborhood, one may unconsciously continue to accept one's Jewishness in residual terms of ethnic "belonging"; in the suburbs and in most smaller towns this is no longer possible: one must begin to think "seriously" of his Jewishness, and the only possible outcome of such thinking in present-day America is identification with the Jewish religious community, frequently leading to affiliation with the synagogue. 1 Contrary to standard narratives of postwar assimilation-as-deracination, Herberg proposes that third-generation Jews actually became, in some respects, more Jewish than their parents as a result of their move to the suburbs. "Jewishness," in this account, emerges as a particular thing--as an identity--in the absence of the quotidian framework provided by the urban Jewish neighborhood. [End Page 553] Jeffrey Melnick tells a related story in A Right to Sing the Blues, his new book about the relationship between Jews and African Americans in the music industry of the early twentieth century. Melnick presents his account as a prehistory of "Black-Jewish relations," which he contends "needs to be approached--not exclusively, but still significantly--as a story told by Jews about interracial relations." 2 This discourse emerges as a recognizable phenomenon, Melnick argues, in the late 1960s, just as relationships between the two groups were breaking down under pressure of increasing "economic disparity" and "different levels of cultural power." 3 In the face of this widening gap--which Karen Brodkin and George Lipsitz have related to suburbanization and other material events in the postwar United States 4 --"Black-Jewish relations" emerged as a "romantic tale about the relative unimportance of class status in melting pot America." 5 With its "basic plot . . . about the comparative suffering of Jews and Blacks," 6 the discourse of black-Jewish relations mobilized another potent identity formation--this one grounded in canons of "authentic" suffering--in order to "argue[ ] for the utopian (post-class or trans-class) possibilities of liberal democracy." 7 Thinking about these issues usefully refines our conception of identity politics. This seems particularly necessary at the current moment because the project of identity politics has recently taken a number of hits--not, as it happens, from the right, but from other factions of the left. From the liberal left, scholars such as Walter Benn Michaels and Ross Posnock have argued that identity politics, like the early twentieth-century cultural pluralism it grew out of, reproduces the logic of the "racialist, nativist thinking" it sets out to repudiate. 8 From the Marxist left, meanwhile, Rosemary Hennessy has repeated the longstanding assertion that political movements grounded in identity categories like race, gender, and sexuality fail to recognize the "determining force" of class and thus run the risk of commodified complicity with neo-liberal capitalism. 9 Both these lines of argument make key points about the project of identity politics that dominated the American left roughly from the late 1960s through the late 1990s, in particular taking to task identity politics' problematic tendencies towards either rigid essentialism or the facile celebration of diversity. It may be, though, that the critique of identity politics has become reflexive enough in the contemporary academy to itself raise suspicions. At the very least, we need to press [End Page 554] critics of identity politics to complicate their object of study in ways that they have not done. Certainly Michaels...