Roth's Book Research Articles

Responsible Mischief: Roth as Reader

Abstract: Roth, as we know, had many identities, but he was always a reader. This paper explores how literature helped him forge an identity, starting in adolescence, his book-besotted college years, and beyond. Like all great writers, Roth was a great reader, consuming novels, stories, and essays in great, gluttonous gulps. Roth read for many reasons, some banal, some surprising, but in a life of flux, books were a constant. They offered pleasure, stimulation, and distraction. In a way, Roth's longest, deepest relationship was with literature. What he read nourished what he wrote; indeed, Roth's books would have many blank pages if one removed the literary allusions. The intimate connection between the man, his reading, and his writing is what we'll explore—in several ways. First, through a discursive peek into Roth's vast library, donated to the Newark Public Library and carefully preserved per Roth's instructions. Second, by reading Roth's own testimony, in interviews, public events, and private correspondence. By way of context, we'll consider libraries—what they reveal, what they conceal—and the paradoxical nature of reading itself. Finally, we'll shine a bright biographical light on Roth himself. Using his reading as a lens, we'll explore periods of formation and transformation, including the late-life changes that produced his haunted (and haunting) final novels. Throughout our investigation, we'll attempt to answer a single question: how was Roth-the-reader different from the other Roths we've come to know?

Reading Philip Roth: Primacy Effect, Authorial Intentions, and the Writer's Extended Mind

Reading Philip RothPrimacy Effect, Authorial Intentions, and the Writer's Extended Mind Pia Masiero (bio) Reflecting on my first encounter with philip roth is a tricky matter. We all know that there is no such thing as remembering things as they indeed were because memories serve different functional purposes and are, thus, inevitably, the result of narrativizing moves. The problem concerns the possibility of returning to the moment of previousness, to the first eventful crossing of the threshold of the first book. The context of that first reading emerges against the context of my writing this piece now. This latter erodes and problematizes the founding necessity of the former because it has narrativized it to look like a sort of prologue of my story as Roth's reader. The prologue, thus, bears the signs containing the seeds of future development, which happens to be the very core of the narrative that makes the retrieval impossible. In this disheartening circularity, there might be one way to retrace the phenomenology of that eventful first encounter. What I set out to explore in the following pages may be condensed into one question: what kind of reader did Roth's books allow me to be? This question touches upon the most obvious of facts: I have met Roth as a reader. Yes, I was privileged enough to be present at his eightieth birthday in Newark in March 2013, to shake his hand and have my two-minute glorious exchange. Still, Roth is essentially, quintessentially, I should say, the man behind the words I can read and reread on the pages of his books. His words, thus, and only his words, are the tangible presence I can deal with; when speaking about novels, words are the phenomenon, as Martin Heidegger put it, the showing-itself, "that which does the announcing, that which in its showing-itself indicates something which does not show itself" (53). This is the field of phenomena, the world, that my readerly consciousness discloses, or rather, following Edmund Husserl, "the corresponding subjective experiences in which we become conscious of [the world or the things], in which (in the broadest sense) they 'appear'" (qtd. in Gallagher 1). The words on the page disclose—and [End Page 111] continue to disclose every time I read—the world that Roth is, which does not show itself but is both contained and evoked in the words he chooses for every sentence in his thirty-one novels. Back to my first encounter, then, keeping this frame in mind. I read my first Roth novel—The Human Stain (2000)—during the Louisville Summer Institute on Contemporary American Literature in 2005. The third installment of Roth's American trilogy was meant to contribute to drawing a literary map of the Contemporary American literary landscape. Coleman Silk's ode to the "raw-I" (805) and his destruction at the hands of forces greater than his pioneering individuality was part of a heterogeneous syllabus that included, among others, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Guillermo Gómez Peña. This is—in itself—worth pondering: on the one hand, Roth reached me with his twenty-second book, well past the conflicting relationships with his Jewish community and into his major phase; on the other, he crossed my path together with a melting pot of writers and not through a genealogy of Jewish American authors, as the junior to two formidable elders, Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud. Be as it may, The Human Stain was my first encounter with a Roth novel: a Zuckerman book presenting both the apotheosis of Roth's immersion in American history and his obsession with narrative matters. I was far from knowing and understanding the underpinnings of Roth's masking practices; nonetheless, it was clear to me that this was a book about a writer's handling of his materials at least as much as it was a book about memorable, intrinsically opaque, characters trying to find a usable sense of themselves against an overpowering, larger than life, American history. The opacity of the so-called other minds came to me as the singular predicament of Nathan Zuckerman, a writer who tackles it...

Newark Revisited: A Philip Roth for the Twenty-First Century

Newark RevisitedA Philip Roth for the Twenty-First Century Michael Kimmage (bio) Philip Roth died in the second year of the Trump presidency. He was a critic of the new president in sharper terms than he had been of George W. Bush or even Richard Nixon, whose shadow falls across a number of Roth's novels. Apart from Roth's opposition to the Vietnam War, to which he devoted a small portion of his literary celebrity—his name, as it were—Roth was never an overtly political writer or an overtly political man. He was an FDR Democrat, and in this he was his father's son. That made him, as he surely knew, somewhat uninteresting as an American writer. It would have been interesting if he had, like John Updike, come out in favor of the Vietnam War. It would have been interesting if he had been a Marxist or a Zionist or a neoconservative. There is no political destiny for an American writer less gripping intellectually and culturally than to be centrist Democrat. For this reason, Roth had a political profile that almost erased itself. As times goes by, his boring political profile is likely to be erased from the memory of his life and career. As Roth himself would have been the first to argue, he should be remembered for his literature, for his many books, and not for the political positions he took in public or in private. Yet it would be a mistake to place politics on one side of Roth's critical reception and literature on the other. It would be an even worse mistake to do so in the wake of the Trump presidency, which has altered the texture of American politics and which has issued from an alteration in the texture of American politics. To these alterations Roth's literature has much to say. Events can occasion the rediscovery or rethinking of an existing body of literature—the Nixon presidency, for example, that made Roth think he was living in Kafka's America (see his 1974 essay "Our Castle"); or the reappearance of Moby-Dick in the 1930s after decades of callous neglect, just in time for Captain Ahab to accompany the fascist dictators leading their respective Pequods into the abyss. The Plot Against America has proven itself [End Page 79] a major novel of the Trump era, from which it will be forever inseparable as gloss and as prophecy, despite having been published in 2004. At least as rich is Roth's so-called American Trilogy and through it his literature of place, of de-industrialization, of American decay—in a word, his literature of Newark, New Jersey. This was the anti-celebratory fiction Roth fashioned in a decade far more hospitable to self-celebration. Finally, Roth's sense of himself as a civic writer and his sense of his novels as civic in nature and effect bears directly on the fractures and divisions of the Trump era. Roth's books are a meditation on a nation's story conceived in the glow of World War II patriotism and carried a bit beyond the end of the twentieth century. This meditation is frozen in time. It ceased with Roth's death in May 2018, but because it took shape in literature and is alive with the life of its readers, Roth's meditation is also ongoing. It evolves every time his books are read in real time. ________ Upon publication, The Plot Against America was misread as an exposé of the Bush administration. The misreading assumed it to be a roman à clef in which the Charles Lindbergh who assumes the presidency in place of Franklin Roosevelt represented George W. Bush. Indeed, this could only have been a misreading of Roth's counter-factual novel. Charles Lindbergh was famously an isolationist. He was an anti-Semite, a harsh opponent of FDR, and an American who was partial to the National Socialists in Germany, who in turn regarded him as the beau ideal of the Aryan hero. (Hermann Goering owed his ascent within the Nazi movement to his celebrity status as a World War I pilot.) The historical Lindbergh and the one...

The Plot Against Philip Roth

The Plot Against Philip Roth* Timothy Parrish (bio) The PRS inbox is overflowing with queries regarding Philip Roth's premature death. While obviously discomfited by this alleged news, published in a journal we need not disclose, rest assured that our position has been, and remains, Roth won't die until we, his readers, do. Unfortunately, some of you mock what you call our naïve high-mindedness. Without Roth around to crank out books every year like clockwork, the mockers assert, what the hell are we going to have to write about? Jobs are on the line here! Given such hostility, we are almost relieved that others have chosen the comfort of denial. Pointing to his recent emails to The New Yorker concerning the confidence man we just elected President, more than a few of you have dismissed the report as false. As one wag says, the story, not Roth, is DOA. Denial, however, is not a position PRS can endorse. Consequently, we believe it our duty to share with you news so unsettling that its bearers have invented aliases and fake email accounts in order to relay to us the information without blowback. We initially dismissed these Secret Rothians, as our editors labeled them. Since they are so obviously steeped in the kabbalah, David said, they loved conspiracies for their own sake. Exactly, Deb replied. If one didn't already exist, they'd invent it and ask how long you had been hiding it. At which point, David asked Deb how long she had been hiding this particular conspiracy and soon thereafter I was asked to provide this preamble to what we have been able to glean so far. The charge is that this report of Roth's "final hours" is the tip of the iceberg of a cover-up so vast in its scope that it has grave consequences for Roth and, perhaps more importantly, our status as Roth critics. Based in part on careful, expert readings of Roth's oeuvre, the Secret Rothians claim that none of Roth's books since Sabbath's Theater is authentic: that is, written by Roth. Relying on information not yet verified, they insist that in 1995 a gang of creative writing [End Page 95] students, at the instigation of creative writing instructors jealous of Roth's success, killed Roth, cremated his body, hijacked his identity, and, with the aid of the notorious Jackal Wiley, proceeded to counterfeit every Roth novel since Sabbath's Theater. For fifteen years evolving teams of MFA aspirants, having enrolled in a seminar called "Learning to Write Like Philip Roth," were locked down in a fortified basement in Iowa City. Led by the Jackal and his surrogates, rotating members of the Creative Writing faculty, these sequestered "writers" were held hostage until they had produced a "Roth quality" novel, at which point they were freed from bondage, graduated, and sworn to silence on penalty of death so that what was done to them could be repeated without retaliation upon the next class. The arrangement had its perks, naturally. The Jackal secured the newly minted MFAs book contracts and provided them with advance blurbs already on file from his stable of "writers" for their own future books, not ruling out the prospect of manufacturing these projects from future classes of as yet "untrained" writers. Their supervisors kept mum about their roles in the conspiracy in exchange for tenure. We have been reliably informed that many are now much sought after as Creative Writing Gurus at Syracuse, Houston, and CalArts, among other locales, where the conspiracy had been spread. How, you ask, could this happen right under our noses? Wasn't PRS reviewing the novels as they happened? Shouldn't somebody have known? The editors of PRS acknowledge a breach in security may have occurred, but hasten to add that such a breach, if it happened, happened under previous editorial guidance. Our new policy is to bring the news to you as we receive it. Brace yourselves. According to the Secret Rothians, in 2010, after Nemesis was completed, there was some kind of coordinated revolt on the Iowa and Syracuse campuses and thus no Roth novels have been published since...

“A Woman's Point of View”: Dialogue and Perspective in Alex Ross Perry's <em>Listen Up Philip</em>

Philip Roth's novels have reputation for being unfilmable.1 Only handful of adaptations have been made his impressive body of work, yet these have yielded mixed results and never quite seem to work as well screen as the written page. Perhaps the most egregious case in point is Ernest Lehman's 1972 Portnoy's Complaint, in which the book's subversive mischievousness is reduced to series of shouting matches and missed gags. Even relatively straight like Robert Benton's 2003 The Human Stain replaces Roth's fierce attack political correctness with staid melodrama. The issue, however, is not the films' fidelity to their source novels. As Robert Stam points out, the notion of literal fidelity is highly problematic. Not only does it carry moral overtones suggesting that cinema is necessarily secondary and derivative vis-a-vis literature,2 but it also assumes that the novel contains an extractable essence, a kernel of meaning or nucleus of events that can be 'delivered' by an adaptation (Beyond Fidelity 57). An adaptation, he argues, is rather like translation, which suggests that any text can produce an infinity of different readings.3 Nonetheless, in the case of Roth adaptations, something appears to be lost in translation. Roth's books derive much of their power not plot but their vivid voices and their exploration of the characters' inner lives. Most of the adaptations, however, have failed to express these elements in successful manner. As Ira Nadel puts it, (or individual directors) seems to be unable to shift the rhetorical resources found in Roth to the screen, making it difficult to capture the self-conscious narrative style of Roth's best (53). Alex Ross Perry's Listen Up Philip, released in 2014, is not strict of Philip Roth, yet it draws many elements his oeuvre and weaves them into the film. In doing so, Perry opens up dialogue with Roth, and the film as both playful homage to and critical reconsideration of his work. This approach is in itself tribute to Roth and the dialogical dimension of his fiction, and may best explain how the film manages to capture his writing more effectively than any other so far.Linda Hutcheon defines adaptations as deliberate, announced, and extended revisitations of prior works (xiv). Listen Up Philip does not acknowledge its relation to Philip Roth's novels in legal sense. There is no based on or adapted from disclaimer. From the outset, however, many visual clues abound. The title uses the same font that is featured prominently the cover of the first edition of Portnoy's Complaint as well as other Roth novels of the 1970s. The title card and closing credits use yellow color that is reminiscent of the background color of the same edition. And of course, the titular character and Roth share the same first name.More conspicuously, Perry borrows part of the plot of The Ghost Writer. The main character, Philip (played by Jason Schwartzman), is young Jewish author the verge of success. He is about to publish his second novel, the cryptically titled Obidant. Leaving his girlfriend Ashley Kane (Elizabeth Moss) behind in New York, he decides to accept the invitation of his literary idol, the renowned author Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce), to spend the summer at his residence upstate. There, in lieu of the elusive Amy Bellette, he finds Zimmerman's daughter Melanie (Krysten Ritter). Zimmerman is reflection of E. I. Lonoff in The Ghost Writer but also of Zuckerman in the American trilogy and, to certain extent, of Roth himself.4 Zimmerman's house in the woods is similar to Lonoff 's clapboard farmhouse (Ghost 3) and Zuckerman's two-room cabin (Stain 36) in the Berkshires. Like them, Zimmerman has renounced the clamor of the city: You can't get anything done here. It has creative energy, but not productive energy. Zimmerman's name, echoing Zuckerman's, means carpenter (literally room man) in German, which further associates him with seclusion. …

Getting People Right. Getting Fiction Right: Self-Fashioning, Fictionality, and Ethics in the Roth Books

Getting People Right. Getting Fiction Right:Self-Fashioning, Fictionality, and Ethics in the Roth Books Stefan Kjerkegaard (bio) On the basis of readings in several self-fashioning and thought-provoking novels by Philip Roth this article seeks to rethink a limited set of narratological core concepts such as fiction and fictionality in light of their treatment within recent theories on narrative communication by James Phelan (2011) and Richard Walsh (2007). I will argue in favor of a simpler and more rhetorical model than used by these two leading scholars within narratological studies. According to the definition employed in this essay, the self-fashioning novel uses autobiographical material and means with the intention of reaching specific aesthetic ends. These means might include the author’s name, as in autofiction, or other material such as gender and correspondence in history and identity. Autofictional novels use and abuse the autobiographical contract where author, narrator, and protagonist share the same name. Hence, some autofictions try to hide the fact that they are novels by assimilating autobiographical genres such as autobiography, confession, or memoir, while other autofictions are in fact more or less autobiographies, but use rhetoric related to and imported from fiction. I shall read Roth’s novels consecutively, as gradually developing new understandings of reality and identity, and trace the intersections of aesthetics and ethics in Roth’s body of works. For the most part, my focus will [End Page 121] be on The Facts. A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988) and Operation Shylock. A Confession (1993), two of the most ambiguous of the Roth Books with regard to their limits as works of art, their genre, and their use of autobiographical material. Employing James Phelan’s distinction between ethics of telling and ethics of the told (Phelan 2007), I will argue that the uncompromising aesthetic of these two works, as well as those published immediately before and after them (The Counterlife [1986] and American Pastoral [1997]) is designed to transcend readers’ initially negative moral judgment and lead them to a deeper kind of ethics, grounded in dialogue, discourse, and sociality as such. I will contrast Phelan’s understanding of narrative ethics, as seen from the viewpoint of the literary work as an artifact, with Judith Butler’s thoughts on ethics and self-narration in Giving an Account of Oneself. Richard Walsh’s understanding of fictionality as a rhetorical rather than ontological quality plays an important part in the above-mentioned enterprise. Walsh argues that whether you read a text as fictive or assume that a statement is fictional depends on relevance (The Rhetoric of Fictionality 7). What he wants to develop is not a theoretical discourse that removes the artistic enunciation from the world or from referentiality altogether. On the contrary, to adopt a fictionality approach in relation to any kind of work or discourse is, in Walsh’s view, to maximize relevance. The novelty of his theory is that it leads literature back to a simpler rhetorical model—simpler than the models developed in classic rhetorical narratology as, for instance, Seymour Chatman’s idea of an implied author and reader—and that it takes into account an always already communicative relationship between a sender and a receiver (empirical author and reader), and disengages the concept of fictionality from specific media and genre questions. The concept of fictionality can therefore be applied to literature as well as to everyday conversations or full-blown fictional narratives. In Walsh’s words: Fictionality is neither a boundary between worlds, nor a frame dissociating the author from the discourse, but a contextual assumption by the reader, prompted by the manifest information that the authorial discourse is offered as fiction. (36) [End Page 122] Walsh’s understanding of fictionality is compatible with a more discursive approach like Butler’s. I will use both to argue that Roth’s innovative late novels are not merely quixotic and playful metafiction, but serious attempts to tell us something about who we are and how reality works. Their innovation, to use Walsh’s words from Novel Arguments, “far from being a refusal of engagement, is an attempt to extend fiction’s capacity for thinking about the world” (18). The second part of...

Why It's Impossible to Teach Portnoy's Complaint

Why It's Impossible to Teach <i>Portnoy's Complaint</i>

“They been full (w)roth(e) al day, as men may see”; or, Contiguous Roth

“They been full (w)roth(e) al day, as men may see”; or, <i>Contiguous Roth</i>

Brad R. Roth. Sovereign Equality and Moral Disagreement: Premises of a Pluralist International Legal Order

Professor Roth's book addresses what � if it were new, as he suggests � would be an extremely alarming development: namely, the tendency of strong states to intervene in the affairs of their materially weak but formally equal counterparts. Because such interventionism is invariably justified as necessary in order to defend the core principles of a supposedly universal morality (usually, in the UN era, associated with human rights), Roth argues that this practice must be discouraged if the Charter system's commitment to is not to be undermined. As he sees it: The post-World War II order, as constructively amended in the era of decolonization, established the priority of peace and respectful cooperation among judicially equal states; the ethos was one of ideological pluralism and forbearance, qualified only by a Security Council mech anism requiring an extraordinary cross-cutting consensus. That the system leaves unredressed all but the most extraordinary injustices occurring within state boundaries is not an aberrant consequence; the system, mindful that great-power predation has typically flown the flag of righteousness, prioritizes the impeding of impositions (at 284). On a continuum he sets up, running from transcendental justice to moral relativism, Roth therefore argues that the morally correct position to take is one of bounded pluralism. Such a position is pluralistic in that it respects the right to non-intervention even of states ruled by ruthless governments on the grounds that '[w]hat appears disproportionate to someone else's cause, however just, frequently appears exigent in the service of one's own' (at 120). Such a position is bounded, however, in that this respect is limited by the existence of a few clearly universal moral standards. It is clear to Roth, for example, that [t]he duty to refrain from coercive interference can legitimately be overcome in some class of unambiguously catastrophic cases �

Editor's Column

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...

Novelist-Narrators of the American Dream: The (Meta-)Realistic Chronicles of Cather, Fitzgerald, Roth, and Díaz

Halfway through chapter 3 of Philip Roth's American Pastoral (1997), its novelist-narrator Skip Zuckerman transitions abruptly but crucially away from the first-person voice in which he has narrated the first two and a half chapters and into the third-person limited omniscient perspective from which the remaining six and a half chapters will be written. Zuckerman has, at earlier moments in the chapter, alluded to the novel he would (im- mediately after the 1995 events being described) write about the character of Seymour Swede Levov on whom Roth's book has focused from its first words, but here the shift from meta-fiction to the fiction itself is much more complete and striking, and one that Zuckerman accomplishes in a single five-word sentence: I dreamed a realistic chronicle. The next, much lon- ger sentence opens with I began gazing into his life, and then shifts fully into that third-person limited omniscient representation of the Swede's perspective (as imagined by Zuckerman) which will comprise the whole of that chronicle, that novel within the novel. In fact, when Zuckerman writes in that same sentence I found him in Deal, New Jersey, it marks the last time in Roth's book—which will continue for over three hundred thirty pages—that he uses the first-person pronoun or refers to himself and his role as novelist-narrator in any explicit way. 1

Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author (review)

Reviewed by: Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author Marshal Bruce Gentry Derek Parker Royal, ed. Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author. Westport, CT: Praeger-Greenwood, 2005. ix + 303 pp. Philip Roth has been publishing for over fifty years—and for almost twenty years after his quintuple-bypass surgery. Since this brush with death, Roth has not won the Nobel Prize, but he has won almost every major American literary prize—Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, National Book Award, PEN/Faulkner Award—and each of these prizes has been given to a different book. For a long time, Roth must have felt stuck with the reputation of being the author of the scandalous Portnoy’s Complaint published back in 1969, but now perhaps he is known as the author of more recent works, such as Operation Shylock, Sabbath’s Theater, American Pastoral, and The Human Stain. When one wants to introduce people to the works of Philip Roth, where should one advise them to begin reading? Can one start with his recent novel Exit Ghost (2007) without knowing the other related books? Exit Ghost features, facing the title page, a rather intimidating list of twenty-eight Roth titles, grouped as “Zuckerman Books” (of which Exit Ghost is the ninth), “Kepesh Books,” “Roth Books,” “Miscellany,” and “Other Books” (where Portnoy’s Complaint is placed, making it seem almost buried). Or let me put the problem in a more practical form in terms of teaching: if one assigns to an undergraduate [End Page 892] class a novel by Roth, can one give students confidence that they will be able to write an intelligent research paper without reading an entire shelf of Roth? The Founder and President of the Philip Roth Society, Derek Parker Royal, has gathered here, in Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author, essays that can be of great help in addressing the problem of how to approach the serious study of Roth’s works. This collection provides an overview of Roth’s career up to The Plot Against America (2004). Joining Royal among the contributors to the volume are such established critics as David Brauner, Alan Cooper, Bonnie Lyons, Ranen Omer-Sherman, Elaine B. Safer, and Daniel Walden, who provides the foreword. Royal’s introductory essay points out that the essays that follow present Roth’s works in basically chronological order and that all the chapters use the same format. After briefly introducing one or more books and summarizing the plot(s), each chapter examines various literary elements and the critical debates that attach to these elements and then, most importantly, puts each book into the context of Roth’s career. Reading this entire collection, one gets a good sense of the entirety of Roth’s work, of the connections among works, of Roth’s response to his favorite writers (especially Kafka and Bellow), and of the different stances that Roth has taken on the themes he has addressed over the decades: the American family, the suburbs, ethnicity, fame, gender, death, the complex joys of metafiction, etc. Each of the authors also attempts to contribute the newness promised by the book’s subtitle, but the main value of this collection is in its spelling out of a mass of linkages. (I should mention that Roth has published Everyman and Indignation as well as Exit Ghost since this collection appeared, but the book’s usefulness as an overview still holds.) Of course, in such a large, various book, one is sure to encounter some things to quibble with. I wish more typos had been corrected. Also, one cannot agree with every opinion expressed. I do not share contributor Anne Margaret Daniel’s enthusiasm for the baseball jokes in The Great American Novel, and I like When She Was Good more than contributor Julie Husband does. (I was interested to see Husband refer to Lucy Nelson’s “improbable demise,” given that it was likely inspired by a real event [66]: since examining Roth’s manuscripts at the Library of Congress, I have speculated that Roth probably based Lucy’s death scene on a tabloid article that was stuck in with his drafts that tried out...

Roth, W., The Assault on Social Policy

Roth, W., <i>The Assault on Social Policy</i>

Book reviews

Book reviews

How Well Do We Know Max Weber After All? A New Look at Max Weber and His Anglo-German Family Connections

Guenther Roth's study places Max Weber in an intricate network of ties among members of his lineage. This paper presents core findings of Roth's analysis of Weber's family relations, discusses the validity of Roth's core theses and some of the implications of his analysis for Weber as a person and scholar, and addresses how Roth's book may influence future approaches to Weber's sociology.

Book Reviews

BOOK REVIEWS Roth, S J 1997. The blind, the lame and the poor: character types in Luke-Acts. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. 253 pages. ISBN 1-85075-667-8. John Roth's book on 'the blind, the lame and the poor' is the latest publica- tion on the subject. The book is divided up into eight chapters, four of which (chapters 4,5,6,7) are 'core' chapters. The other four are 'supportive' chap- ters. In the study, Roth sets out to answer the question: Why are the blind the lame, lepers, the poor, and the deaf so prominent in the Gospel of Luke and all but absent

Return to The Breast: The Body, the Masculine Subject, and Philip Roth

When Philip Roth published The Breast in 1972, the novella met with a flurry of notice. Some readers picked it up hoping to find Portnoy-like sexual outrageousness, and they weren't disappointed; others, predisposed to be offended, were, and they were likewise disposed to look no further, believing that Roth meant only to shock and titillate. [1] The Breast was clearly a work of its time in its explicit sexual references and flouting of manners, and its readings were perhaps overdetermined not only by the reputation of Portnoy's Complaint (1969) for unrestrained and taboo-breaking representations of sexuality but also by the rantings of Our Gang (1971), the rather coarse political satire that immediately preceded The Breast's publication, and, more broadly, by the novella's appearance on the American scene in the 1970s as part of a wave of transgressive cultural artifacts. One clue to the book's reception might be found in the puzzlement of a reviewer who asked Why this conceit rather than another? (Ridley) . The answer to this question will show The Breast to be a book not just of its time but ahead of its time. Roth anticipated recent investigations into subjectivity and, especially, the masculine subject. The Breast deserves a second look because it challenges some of the most deeply held oppositions--human versus nonhuman, masculine versus feminine, subject versus object, inside versus outside--that structure our thinking about the [2] By forcing a confrontation with the manifold meanings of the gendered body--by representing the very fleshliness of gendering--Roth makes a valuable contribution to thinking about the conventions of subjectivity. When David Kepesh awakes to find that he has metamorphosed into a six-foot mammary gland, the existential question of identity becomes painfully centered on his physical condition. His anatomy is his destiny; he is rewritten bodily as Other. All that remains recognizable of David Kepesh to the outside world is his voice. Roth's book uncovers Kepesh's desperate desire to find that the voice, which most clearly represents the subject as a sentient being to the world, can affirm the possibility of an irreducible self, a self that cannot be altered--morally, psychologically, ontologically--by accident or design. To understand Roth's choice of conceit, however--why a breast rather than some other thing or creature or body part, and why a female body part?--it helps to start with his choice of narrative form. The novella makes no attempt to disguise its indebtedness to Kafka's Metamorphosis. [3] A professor of comparative literature familiar by trade with Kafka's transformation of Gregor Samsa into a gigantic inse ct, David Kepesh concludes that he has, with his own transformation, out-Kafkaed (82). While the metamorphic tradition in Western literature is long and honorable, [4] it is to Kafka we look for the way the metaphor of transformation points to the modern perspective on the human condition--as Geoffrey Green writes: born without our consent, our bodies made to God's order in often odd or peculiar shapes, who is there who has not experienced mystification at the arbitrariness of life? (39) In the allegory of metamorphosis, Kafka's emphatically rational and unquestioning presentation of the inexplicable provides Roth with a form for exploring the inalterability of the self. As Roth remarked to Hermione Lee: My hero has to be in a state of vivid transformation or radical displacement. 'I am not what I am--I am, if anything, what I am not!' (The Art of Fiction 182). How does one ask about the irreducibility of the self unless one can find a means to strip away all that may be reducible? How does one ask about the meaning of the body in relation to the self unless one can test that self against some ultimate physical otherness? One of the strengths of The Breast is the way in which Roth makes an absolutely implausible premise believable--precisely the lesson that he learned best from Kafka. …

Prescription for failure: race relations in the age of social science

As racial tensions ravage America's inner cities, Byron M. Roth argues that the time has come to reassess our public policies on race and rethink the flawed theories that underlie them. In this pathbreaking book, Roth examines the sources of racial conflict and attempts to discover why advances in civil rights for blacks over the past thirty years have not been accompanied by greater harmony between blacks and whites. Roth's central thesis is that America's policies on race have failed because they have been based on social science theories unsupported by sound evidence. He contends that many of the policies initiated in the 1960s were founded on the premise that discrimination was the greatest barrier to black advancement. This premise, Roth argues, no longer reflects reality, as white attitudes toward blacks have unproved and the black middle class has grown. According to Roth, social scientists have failed to communicate to the policy-making community that policies aimed at diminishing white racism can have only a negligible effect on the massive problems of the black underclass. Prescription for Failure touches on a wide range of issues, including the role of the media in perpetuating common misunderstandings about race, the reluctance of social scientists to report on controversial findings that might be construed as insensitive or racist, and the trend on university campuses toward self-segregation among minority students. Written hi a style accessible to the general reader, Roth's book poses a serious challenge to the status quo. It will be of significant interest to political scientists, policymakers, sociologists, and scholars interested hi the study of race.

On the Side of the Mother: Yonnondio and Call It Sleep

Culture has taught us to consume the mother's body--natural and spiritual--without being indebted. --Luce Irigiray The relation between the mother's and language, between maternity and has been a vexing subject for feminist readers. If, as some propose, language and culture rely the loss of the mother, how do we make sense of the mother as subject in literature? On the other hand, if mothering practices construct a maternal subjectivity, how do we recognize authentic forms of her written expression? And what is the relation between feminist desires to reconstruct mothering and the actual perspectives of that may or may not have been textualized? As currently posed, these questions beg a restructuring, one that does not reinscribe the gap between mothers and theory, body and text. Indeed, much feminist theorizing appears compelled by an implied necessity to continue distancing ourselves from maternity.(1) Such a move is analogous to intellectual distancing from the subject of racism. As bell hooks points out, liberal applications to plurality and multiplicity as evidence that racism is over elide the living memory of those for whom it is not.(2) Thus, I begin this essay by asking if there is a feminist way to read with the mother, to read on her side.(3) Is there, for example, a medial space between reader and textualized mother, between interpretive desire and the scenes of mothering, a space that requires feminist critics to move in closer to the maternal subject while honoring a partial separateness, some view the reader cannot entirely replace or reproduce? The two novels I read here, Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio: From the Thirties (1936) and Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1934) explicitly enact textual viewings of the mother. Composed in historical and political proximity, both texts amplify the problematic issue of interpretive appropriation vis-a-vis the maternal body. Foregrounding pre-adolescent sexuality (in Olsen's novel, a daughter's; in Roth's, a son's), each novel emphatically links a mother's physical exposure with narrative insinuations of the reader's positionality. As I will show, only in Olsen's novel are readers obliged to stay with the mother, reviewing her less and reading with her more. What I find intriguing about the juxtaposition of Olsen and Roth are their otherwise several commonalities. Writing in the Depression, Roth and Olsen revivify shared spaces of marginality--urban working class landscapes, violently modeled juvenile interactions, memories of painful migration and naturalization. Both novels give witness to the double alienation of working class men whose lives are experienced as a succession of displacements. In this interest, both novels offer intimate portrayals of a Depression-era masculinism urging work for every able-bodied man. Indeed, in its remythologizing of male agency, the Depression became an exaggerated instance of American gendering. Within this scene of male desire, a woman's inscription is best summarized as sexual mother: physical companion to her husband and mother to her family.(4) But what if we were able to reread texts of the thirties not as an exercise in reviewing maternal representations but in order to look with her at textual and cultural appropriations of a mother's identity? Nineteen and pregnant, Olsen began Yonnondio in 1932, worked the manuscript intermittently for several years but never completed it.(5) Though not published until 1974, most of Yonnondio was thus written in the same years that Roth was composing his novel,(6) and Olsen read Roth's book when it came out in 1934, admiring its domestic preoccupations.(7) At the same time, as Deborah Rosenfelt writes, in the thirties Olsen was consciously writing class literature from a woman's point of view, incorporating a dimension . . . ignored and neglected in the works of most contemporary male leftists. …

Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 1514-1564 (review)

174 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Andreas Vesalius o] Brussels, 151~-156~. By. C. D. O'Malley. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964. Pp. xv § 480. 64 plates. $10.00.) Professor C. D. O'Malley, long a student of Vesalius and of the history of anatomy in the Renaissance, here gives us the fruits of his many years of research. The book has recently been given the Pfizer Award for 1965 as "the best work published during the previous year related to the history of science and written by an American scholar." As such it is a book which only peripherally touches upon the history of philosophy, and, consequently, I shall not discuss its technical aspects. But the interested reader is directed to the reviews in journals dealing specifically with history of science and history of medicine. O'Malley's monograph is meant to replace Moritz Roth's Andreas Vesalius Bruxellensis (Berlin: 1892) as the standard work. In the seventy years since the publication of Roth's work a good deal of research has been done, not only on Vesalius and Renaissance anatomy, but upon other aspects of sixteenth-century life as well. In many ways O'Malley's book recalls Roth's: both are cast in the same chronological form and both incorporate many documents by or concerning Vesalius into lengthy appendices. One might almost say that O'Malley took Roth's book as a model to be emulated. The change in intellectual climate between Berlin in the 1890s and Los Angeles in the 1960s is clearly indicated, however, by the fact that Roth printed his quotations from source materials in the original languages, whereas O'Malley translates into English throughout. The book can be divided into three unequal parts: (1) the intellectual and family background of Vesalius (pp. 1-27), (2) Vesalius' life and accomplishment (pp. 28-314), and (3) an Appendix of translations (pp. 316-420). There are also 64 pages of excellently chosen illustrations (including numerous samples from the Fabrica, one of the great landmarks in the history of book illustration), extensive end-notes (pp. 421-472), and an index of proper names--but, alas, not of historians who have written on Vesalius and who are mentioned in the notes. There is no separate bibliography, but the notes seem to cite all of the relevant secondary material; this information is rendered largely useless because of the lack of an index of historians. Since there already exists a carefully done biobibhography of Vesalius by Harvey Cushing (1943), there was no need to be overly detailed with regard to editions of Vesalius' works and the older literature referring to him. For a few publications relevant to the subject which have appeared since O'Malley finished his book and for a general survey of Vesahus research over the past half century, see 0'Malley's recent article, "A Review of Vesalian Literature," History o] Science, IV (1965), 1-14. The central and most important portion of the book is a chronological account of Vesalius' life with numerous digressions which illuminatingly analyze and discuss his individual works, his friends and acquaintances, and the intellectual influences which went into his formation. O'MaUey finds the major weakness of Roth's biography to lie "in its too enthusiastic appreciation of Vesalius' achievement without sufficient credit to his predecessors and contemporaries" (p. ix). He attempts to correct this by viewing the great anatomist more objectively and by carefully evaluating his achievement in relation to that of his contemporaries, predecessors, and successors. Even this re-evaluation, however, leaves this reader, at least, still somewhat puzzled regarding Vesalius' relation to Galen and the Galenic tradition. Vesalius saw his contribution to anatomy largely in terms of an improvement upon Galen and a correction of the many mistakes which Galen had made in that field. Although Vesalius doubtlessly was able to emend Galen in many particulars, as O'Malley so clearly points out, one cannot help wondering whether the Paduan professor was not overly harsh on his predecessor and, in fact, failed to recognize many of the real debts which he owed him. Vesalius was first and foremost an anatomist, whereas Galen had much broader intellectual...