Sabbath's Theater Research Articles

Roth and the Poets

Beginning with a survey of the key poets in Philip Roth's personal library—there are over eighty—this essay considers the function, style, and value of poetry in his work. At many of the most intense moments in Roth's fiction, a poetic lyricism dominates, whether it is Mickey Sabbath at the Jersey shore or the final paragraph of The Human Stain (2000). From the start of his career, Roth found a place for poetry—whether in his earliest short stories or in his most successful fiction, notably Portnoy's Complaint (1969), Sabbath's Theater (1995), or American Pastoral (1997), although its function shifted from the explicit sexuality of "Leda and the Swan" in Portnoy's Complaint to the meditative pastoralism of Indian Hill camp in Nemesis (2010). Its presence constantly reflects Roth's literary grounding originating in his undergraduate and graduate readings supplemented by contact with poets at Chicago, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Princeton, and Penn. Specific remarks on individual poems will reflect their use in individual novels with Donne, Milton, and Keats featured.

Theatricality in Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater

In Sabbath's Theater (1995), Philip Roth returns to his themes of predilection, namely art, sexuality, identity, and American society, but reexamines them through the mediation of theatricality, a concept used to illuminate a wide range of cultural phenomena and communicative processes. This article investigates the cultural, sexual, and identity politics that the narrative considers while constructing a monumental character, Mickey Sabbath, a theater man par excellence, who accumulates a wide range of theatrical positions to severely critique American culture and the narrowness of the American mind.

"The Uncontrollability of Real Things": Operation Shylock, Sabbath's Theater, and Philip Roth's Falstaffian Theology of Judaism

Philip Roth's engagement with William Shakespeare has been a steady and intense career-long affair. Hermione Lee, in remarks delivered on the occasion of Roth's eightieth birthday, observed that Roth's use of Shakespeare extends at least as far back as Portnoy's Complaint (1969). "Roth has Shakespeare deep in his head," Lee averred, and of this there can be no doubt. What can be questioned, however, is the upward-charting trajectory of Roth's use of Shakespeare. Even a cursory reading of Roth reveals that the more he aged, and the more his career progressed, the more he invoked Shakespeare, demonstrated in the series of novels beginning with Operation Shylock (1993), crescendoing in Sabbath's Theater (1995), and culminating in Exit Ghost (2007) and The Humbling (2009). Roth's greater use of Shakespeare in the later stages of his career—greater in the dual senses of frequency and engagement—can be ascribed, this article argues, to Roth's growing involvement with Jewish identity and human mortality.

Getting People Wrong: Some Preliminary Thoughts on Philip Roth's Passing

Getting People WrongSome Preliminary Thoughts on Philip Roth's Passing Matthew Shipe (bio) A few weeks after Philip Roth's death this past May at the age of 85, I was invited to participate in a podcast hosted by fellow Roth Society member Danny Anderson. He had invited me on his show, The Sectarian Review, to discuss Roth's long and distinguished career and speculate on his ultimate impact on American literary culture. I had never done a podcast before and have always been apprehensive about the platform—when using it, I always recall that bit in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996) when a Skype-like invention creates a sort of national existential crisis as people become painfully self-conscious and purchase attractive mannequins to be their stand-ins for video chats. Nevertheless, I was more than happy to talk about Roth with Danny and his other guest Michial Farmer, a friend I had met through Updike circles.1 For around two hours we bandied about our favorite bits of Roth's work and somehow tried to solidify our thoughts on what his fiction had meant to us. Midway through the podcast, Danny and I recalled the Roth@80 event, laughing at the memory of finding ourselves in a room with Don DeLillo, Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Lethem, Louise Erdrich, and, of course, Roth himself, without a drink anywhere in sight. The night was somewhat surreal—it felt a little bit like being thrust, sober and slightly underdressed, into a Fellini film.2 I do remember managing to nudge myself in line behind Don DeLillo as he ordered a Sprite.3 I think I ordered one too hoping that I might impress him (shockingly, the gesture wasn't noticed). At the end of that night, I made my way to the front of the room to talk with Roth—again, I'd like to reiterate that this would have been the type of event where a drink (or two) would have been very handy. It was my one time to meet Roth: I can't remember what I had told him—something fairly generic about how much his work had meant to me—but I'm grateful that I was able to tell him this and he was gracious in our brief conversation. As I was finishing up, some family [End Page 130] friends approached and a flurry of pictures were taken. I like to believe that I'm in the back of one of those photos, an unidentified curly-haired mystery man never to be identified in some Roth family photo book. After sharing stories of that night, Danny asked us to read aloud our favorite passage from Roth's fiction as a way to wrap up the conversation. While there are countless passages I could have selected, the choice for me was fairly easy. I turned to my well-worn copy of American Pastoral (1997), the novel that was my first real introduction to Roth when I was an undergraduate back in the late '90s. I qualify it as my "real introduction" because I know I had read a few of the stories in Goodbye, Columbus (1959) while in high school—we did "Defender of the Faith" and maybe "Eli the Fanatic" sometime during my senior year—but I had not really experienced Roth until American Pastoral was assigned in Professor Marshall Boswell's junior seminar titled "The Literature of Replenishment."4 That course, more than anything, propelled me down the Roth rabbit hole. After the semester, I snatched up a remaindered copy of Sabbath's Theater (1995), and soon after found myself quickly making my way through much of Roth—zipping through the first Zuckerman trilogy after graduation, reading Letting Go (1962) after my first year in grad school,5 and then tackling The Human Stain (2000) the summer after it had been released as I was recovering from that first year in grad school. I confess I didn't pick up Portnoy's Complaint (1969) until much later in my Roth reading, and I still haven't read When She Was Good (1967), a lapse that I was loudly called out on by students...

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...

Yeatsian Agony in Late Roth

This essay explores the influence of W. B. Yeats on the later fiction of Philip Roth. Tracing Roth's engagement with Yeats from Portnoy's Complaint (1969) right up to Nemesis (2010), I argue that Roth has throughout his career been fascinated with Yeats's various aspirations to escape into aesthetic disinterest. I contend that Yeats's absorption of this struggle between life and art into a poetics of bodily agony in his later poems has a decisive influence on Roth. Yeats not only helps to shape the focus of powerful novellas such as The Dying Animal (2001) but also forms a crucial touchstone for the reckless abandon and sublime style of Roth's major novel Sabbath's Theater (1995). Roth's attentive reading of Yeats's later poems might alert us to trace wider investments in modernist epistemological tensions across Roth's fiction.

“Tragedy wrought to its uttermost”: Philip Roth's <em>Sabbath's Theater</em> and the Art of Dying

Building on recent criticism that has unpacked Friedrich Nietzsche’s influence on Philip Roth, this article explores how Roth’s reimagining of Nietzschean tragedy in Sabbath’s Theater is also connected to the psychoanalytic theories of mourning developed by Sigmund Freud and Julia Kristeva. Roth’s innovative reinterpretation of melancholia is further shown to contain wide-ranging intertextual relationships to American philosophies of theatricality, the poetry of W. B. Yeats, and Shakespearean tragedy.

Philip Roth's Chekhovian Formula: Suicide and Art in <em>The Humbling</em> and <em>The Seagull</em>

ROTH, CHEKHOV, AND A GUNIn Philip Roth's Humbling (2009), actor Simon Axler suddenly and inexplicably loses his magic. Axler is devastated and, much like Mickey Sabbath before him, contemplates throughout the novel without finding the means to go through with it. Only when he intuits that he will have to act role does he succeed with his self-destructive plan: [H]e would have to pretend [. . .] that he was Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplev in the concluding scene of Seagull' (139-40). Axler finally shoots just as Treplev does in Anton play. Accordingly, Claudia Roth Pierpont remarks: [T]his is man who keeps gun in his attic, and knows his (309).Pierpont alludes to Chekhov's principle of plot-construction that, according to Roth's own Nathan Zuckerman, refers to Chekhov's famous dictum that pistol hanging on the wall in Act One must eventually go off in Act (Counterlife 108). gun goes off in both Seagull and Humbling, but the apparently indispensable Konstantin Treplev is troubling plot device in Roth's novel. protagonist of comedy Seagull (Chayka, 1895) aspires to be great, innovative writer and to win the heart of his beloved, but when he fails as an artist and as lover, he kills himself. Treplev commits because he has never found his magic-arguably fitting counterpart to Axler's dilemma. On still closer inspection, however, Axler's accomplishment looks more curious: play ends with Dr. Dorn's laconic comment, The fact is, he's shot himself (Seagull 125)1- Treplev, it must be noted, is never seen committing in the concluding scene of Seagull. puzzling question is therefore: How could Axler enact that is never properly performed? How could he kill as Treplev, considering that whoever character never holds pretend gun, never pulls pretend trigger, never pretends to kill onstage?Anton influence on Roth can be tracked throughout much of his career. Roth has taught college courses on Chekhov; he has adapted last play Cherry Orchard for production with Claire Bloom and attempted to adapt the short story The Name-Day Party for television (Pierpont 76, 142, 102). Chekhov is also continual reference point in Roth's original fiction: in 'I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting'; or, Looking at Kafka, Aunt Rhoda gets part in Three Sisters, play that has been read to her from the opening line to the final curtain by none other than Dr. Franz Kafka (Reading 298). Other performances of Chekhov are recalled in Sabbath's Theater (129) and Prague Orgy (14, 59). story He and She provides premise for Nathan Zuckerman's playlet of the same name in Exit Ghost (146). His college essay on E. I. Lonoff, which describes his literary idol as Gogol filtered through the humane skepticism of (Ghost 13), had already testified to the fact that Zuckerman is no less knowledgeable about Chekhov than David Kepesh, who, in Professor of Desire, is immersed in story worlds while he struggles with book on the Russian writer. No wonder that Pierpont calls Chekhov one of Roth's presiding literary gods (93). Roth's allegiance to Chekhov might be enough to explain Axler's choice. However, considering how many suicide plays would have provided Axler with more obvious foundation for acting out his suicide-among them even Ivanov, in which the eponymous protagonist shoots onstage before the final curtain-it is surprising that Roth resorts to Seagull to finish off his novel and his character. Adding further to the riddles of this intertextual connection, Axler comes up with list of plays, musing about their curious abundance in canonical literature and wondering whether is a formula fundamental to the drama (Humbling 39). …

Jewish anxiety and the novels of Philip Roth

Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter One: Jewish Anxiety: Goodbye Columbus, Eli, The Fanatic, and Portnoy's Complaint Chapter Two: Spectres of Roth: The Ghost Writer, Exit Ghost, and Zuckerman Unbound Chapter Three: Double-Consciousness and the Jewish Heart of Darkness: The Counterlife and Operation Shylock Chapter Four: The American Berserk: Sabbath's Theater and American Pastoral Chapter Five: Playing it Any Way You Like: The Human Stain Chapter Six: Counterfactual Terror: The Plot Against America Conclusion: What we talk about when we talk about Anne Frank Bibliography Index

Confronting the “C” Word: Cancer and Death in Philip Roth's Fiction

I wanted this to be saddest thing I'd ever written.-Michael Faber, 2014In September of 2014, Scottish author Michael Faber retired from writing fiction just after publishing his latest novel, The Book of Strange New Things. Although he originally envisioned it as a work of science fiction, it became more tied to realities of everyday life when Eva, his wife and partner of 26 years, was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. As Faber reflected in an interview for The New York Times: Once Eva was ill, I had these huge wellings of sadness, but also this sense of preciousness of human life while we have that gift, and that fed into book as well [....] Ultimately, story invites you to feel gratitude for this vehicle that fixes itself. One of cruel ironies of course is that Eva had a disease that didn't fix itself (Alter).The retirement of Faber shocked writing community, much like retirement of Philip Roth just a few years earlier. While Faber is less known and less prolific than Roth, both men share a desire to capture preciousness of human life by writing story of a woman dying of cancer. While Eva was very real spouse behind Faber's novel, Roth too has lost women he loved to cancer, most specifically Janet Hobhouse, a very close friend, and Veronica Geng, his long time publisher (Pierpont 281). The resulting books depicting cancer of women indeed feel like the saddest thing ever written, to draw on Faber's likely allusion to famous opening line of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (1915), a novel which also features tragically premature death of a woman.For many readers, it's not surprising that women and an unspeakable c word might be linked in Philip Roth's fiction. Yet I have in mind is not vulgar; it is cancer. This illness, which strikes characters such as Drenka Balich, Consuela Castillo, and Amy Bellette, has been considered too little in Roth's fiction. Rather than discuss Roth's apparent misogyny, often a frame used to read his work, I argue that his characters with cancer, especially vibrant women of Sabbath's Theater (1995), The Dying Animal (2001), and Exit Ghost (2007), reveal an artistic understanding of women that is more ethical than objectifying, more humane than sexually predatory. Such a reading, I hope, not only defends Roth against charge of misogyny, but also casts him in a fully ethical light: by shifting our focus from one c-word to another- from so often focus in reading Roth's fiction, to cancer-we can see more about Roth's approach to women and indeed, humanity, in general.Over course of Roth's writing about cancer, we might further trace a trajectory in his evolving sense of ethical relation. Whereas Sabbath's Theater takes as its focus mourning of Mickey Sabbath in wake of his loss of Drenka, The Dying Animal depicts recognition that mourning is actually a betrayal of dying other, and Exit Ghost ultimately emphasizes ways in which such diseases point up unreliability of a narrator when grappling with traumatic recognition of mortality of a loved one. My readings of these three novels make a central claim for how Roth's representation of women with cancer attests to a moral vision that has often been overlooked by readers, precisely because they have misread his view of radical otherness to obtain only in sexualized and objectifying terms that other c word, cunt, implies.Each of these novels features a man who dies (Morty Sabbath, George O'Hearn, George Plimpton), a foil who facilitates Roth's protagonist's confrontation with his own death; but there is always a woman who dies of cancer, too. Why have these women been so overlooked, secondary, considered by readers solely as a sexual distraction? For me, they ought to become focal point, a collective voice, even a chorus requiring of us that we confront cancer that is simultaneously at center of these books and omnipresent in our lives. …

Philip Roth, Thomas Mann, and the Other Other Europe

For an intellectual product of any value to exert an immediate influence which shall also be deep and lasting, it must rest on an inner harmony, yes, an affinity, between the personal destiny of its author and that of its contemporaries in general. Men do not know why they award fame to one work of art rather than another. Without being in the faintest connoisseurs, they think to justify the warmth of their commendations by discovering in it a hundred virtues, whereas the real ground of their applause is inexplicable-it is sympathy. Aschenbach had once given direct expression-though in an unobtrusive place-to the idea that almost everything conspicuously great is great in despite: has come into being in defiance of affliction and pain, poverty, destitution, bodily weakness, vice, passion, and a thousand other obstructions. And that was more than observation-it was the fruit of experience, it was precisely the formula of his life and fame, it was the key to his work. What wonder, then, if it was also the fixed character, the outward gesture, of his most individual figures? -Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (384)Luckily for them, they did not know where the comedy left off and the tragedy began; and we let them remain in their happy belief that the whole thing had been a play up till the end (Mann 1946: 529). With its stereotypically Rothian ring, this sentence could easily be applied, as a thesis statement of sorts, to several of Roth's major novels. Portnoy's Complaint, for example, balances comedy with tragedy, the comedy of sexual appetite emancipated in the Age of Aquarius with the tragedy of Alexander Portnoy's hyperactive superego. Portnoy's therapy is tragicomic theater, an act of self-invention detached from the unknowable realities of his adult life. Its very title a reference to a play, Operation Shylock fits the overlapping tragedies of twentieth-century Jewish history into the genre of screwball comedy, of faked identities, madcap schemes, and a relentless uninvited absurdity. It is inundated with the theatrical, people acting out within and against their given historical roles, however serious and implacable the history in question may be. The thin line between comedy and tragedy, made thinner by constant playacting, is precisely the principle that underscores Sabbath's Theater. Mickey Sabbath is a puppeteer, a man of the theater down to his fingertips, and the tragedy of his brother's death, in World War II, pushes him toward the comedy of his irresponsible maturity. Indigent and suicidal, Sabbath plays King Lear on the New York subway, and he makes a comedy out of this most formidable of tragedies. Yet the sentence cited above is not Roth's. It is from Thomas Mann's short story, and the Magician (1929), a story with which Roth has had an enduring literary relationship. As an undergraduate at Bucknell University, Roth received a prize for a paper he had written about Mario, and according to Claudia Roth Pierpont, Roth says that if he were dying and were allowed to read just one more thing, it would be Mario (76-77).That Roth has a deep love of European literature is no secret. He came of age, intellectually, at a time when Europe was the self-evident center of gravity in American literary culture. His literary education at Bucknell inclined toward the literature of Britain and of continental Europe. The criticism he read, in the Commentary and Partisan Review of the 1950s, was equally European in aura. American writers were expected to immerse themselves in the achievements of Joyce, Proust, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, etc. Either American literature was an offshoot of the European family tree, or there was no meaningful separation between America and Europe in literary matters. Roth's mastery of the English language was, among other things, his point of entry into a European world unfamiliar to his parents and even more so to his Yiddish-speaking greatgrandparents. Roth would never lose his curiosity about modern Europe. …

Memory and the Aesthetics of Deconstruction in Philip Roth's SABBATH’S THEATER

Philip Roth's novel Sabbath's Theater (1995) imparts a fondness for harnessing the innuendoes of critical theory, including but not limited to recognizable psychoanalyses. Leaving Freudian concepts...

Roth's Graveyards, Narrative Desire, and "Professional Competition with Death"

In her article "Roth's Graveyards, Narrative Desire, and 'Professional Competition with Death'" Debra Shostak analyzes Philip Roth's 1954 short story "The Day It Snowed" and surveys a range of his books. Shostak offers a reading of Sabbath's Theater and Everyman to explore Roth's fictional forms and his conception of storytelling, elucidates how the traumatic knowledge of death at graveside initiates the psychoanalytic process of repression, repetition, remembering, and telling, and uncovers several motifs or formal strategies that appear when Roth deploys cemetery scenes: the linear plotting toward death is often embraced within circular narrative structures; the voice of the mother, dead or alive, presides over the protagonist's traumatic confrontation with mortality; and the narrative represents the battle waged between eros and thanatos. From the beginning of his career, Roth has sent his characters to meditate in graveyards or over coffins at crucial junctures such as narrative beginnings and endings. Drawing on psychoanalytic accounts of narrative desire, Shostak argues that Roth is preoccupied with the graveyard scene as a symbolic incitement to the compulsion that he calls in The Human Stain "professional competition with death."

Do You Just Love Philip Roth?

Do You Just <i>Love</i> Philip Roth?

“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>

What Women Want Is Actually What Men Want Too: Yearning for Connection in Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater

Although Philip Roth typically writes characters who are intent on pursuing lust rather than love, Sabbath's Theater (1995), while sexually explicit, portrays a protagonist who reveals a longing for attachment. Analyzed against other recent novels and Leslie Fiedler's thesis that fictional American men eschew family responsibilities and women, this article indicates that far from celebrating infidelity, the novel suggests that this immature masculine identity brings only isolation and regret.

Transgression and Oedipal Politics in Philip Roth's SABBATH’S THEATER

Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater (1995) portrays the protagonist Morris Sabbath as an ingenious puppeteer whose transgressive life and art are steeped in Oedipal conflicts. At first glance, however,...

Critical companion to Philip Roth: a literary reference to his life and work

Critical Companion to Philip Roth is a comprehensive reference to this talented writer's life and works. Coverage includes: A concise but thorough biography of Roth Entries on all of Roth's works, including American Pastoral, The Ghost Writer, Sabbath's Theater, The Human Stain, Zuckerman Unbound, the stories collected in Goodbye, Columbus, The Plot Against America, his nonfiction works, and more. Each entry on a fictional work contains subentries on the work's main characters (including Nathan Zuckerman, Alexander Portnoy, Swede Levov, and more) Entries on related people, places, and topics, such as anti-Semitism, Claire Bloom, Newark, satire, and many more Appendixes, including a chronology, a bibliography of Roth's works, and a secondary-source bibliography.

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...

The Concept of Irony: Jane Austen's Emma and Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater

Jane Austen and Philip Roth share an unexpected and ironic attachment. Unexpected not just because if Austen epitomizes feminine propriety and taste, then Roth represents nadir of misogynistic carnality but also because this similarity is best felt in works that most define this difference: Emma (1816) and Sabbath's Theater (1995). This is not to claim that these texts invite historical comparison or to raise question of influence; rather, what provokes inquiry is way that each of these authors faces down and even overmatches his or her own age. Their shared weapon is irony, and it is from perspective of this concept that two authors can be read together.These two works by Austen and Roth suggest a type of irony exemplified in romanticism's earliest and carried into nineteenth century, where absence, division, and fragmentation are completed by their readers' own mistaken ideas. To take romanticism and irony separately, it should be made clear at outset that this is not kind of definition of romanticism that allowed A. C. Bradley to find Austen anomalous to her own age, age of revival. In Bradley's lecture on Austen, romanticism is centrally concerned with new modes of feeling towards [...] human in its most simple, primitive, or unsocial forms or the idea that civilization is fall of man from some paradisal state of nature (362). However, definition of romanticism that connects Roth and Austen extends constellation of ideas that has arisen in modern literary theory from Maurice Blanchot's essay Athenaeum and its development by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. Together they place at heart of romanticism romantic fragment, exemplified by unfinished artwork. Here, romantic authors use our expectations to deceive us because their texts are completed only by expectations of reader, a use of expectation that reveals, through negation, reader's false ideas and ideals. This theory allows such a fragmentation of expectation to emerge strikingly through Roth's and Austen's analyses of impossibility of specific gender roles that are enacted by their protagonists-Roth's lecherous Nietzschean puppeteer Mickey Sabbath and Austens handsome, clever lady of substance Emma Woodhouse-as they engage with their supporting characters and their readers. Both authors skillfully utilize romantic or fragmentary to disabuse us of our ideas regarding gender-not merely our stereotypes, but also very meaning that is developed from an epistemology based on this division. Another word for this fragmentary negation is irony.The concept of irony at play here is not drawn from any of its three most common avatars: mere curiosity of a coincidence, dissimulation of saying one thing while meaning another, and invention of elite shibboleths allowing membership in a particular clique. All of these are not irony in fragmentary sense used here because they are meant to be understood. Coincidence explains away chaos; dissimulation is purposive and its goal discloses it; and while elite shibboleths may exclude many from understanding, they also are designed to include and to unite against excluded. Contrary to these forms, there are four definitions of irony, necessarily abstract at this point, that lead toward an understanding of Roth's and Austen's use of it. The first two are from early theorist of romanticism, Friedrich Schlegel; third and fourth are from Soren Kierkegaard, a stern critic of former. For Schlegel, irony always emerges as paradox:[In irony,] everything should be playful and serious, guilelessly open and deeply hidden. [. . .] It contains and arouses a feeling of indissoluble antagonism between absolute and relative, between impossibility and necessity of complete communication. [. . . Thus irony is] an absolute synthesis of absolute antitheses, continual self-creating interchange of two conflicting thoughts. …