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2012 Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
In the short story "Eli, the Fanatic," one of Philip Roth's early pieces, we find the prototype for many of Roth's later characters, a Jew deeply ambivalent about his history and identity, so much so, in fact, that he is not even sure whether he has an identity or a history outside the limited confines of his own unconscious desire to manufacture both. And so, Roth creates his protagonists's double, an ironically insistent reminder of the failure of self-invention.
2012 Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
The article examines Roth's exploitation of his own persona through self-reference in his writing. It argues that throughout his career, Roth has challenged readers' expectations of the truth value of narratives that simultaneously expose, conceal, and rewrite the autobiographical subjectâthe "I" in the text. Roth has thereby not only explored postmodern epistemologies of identity, but also has offered fresh angles on the problem of writing the self in a variety of genres: from autobiography and memoir to dialogue and reflexive fiction.
2012 Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
This article examines how Philip Roth's <i>Deception</i>, by enmeshing fiction with autobiography, enlarges the definition of reality. The artist-hero of the text is guilty of deception in both practicing adultery and in adulterating reality by his blatant fictions. Strangely enough, the protagonist's Jewishness lies at the heart of these deceptions. <i>Deception</i>, thus, qualifies as a portrait of the artist as an adulterous Jew.
2012 Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
This essay argues that the texts and countertexts that make up much of Philip Roth's writing complement the interplay between autobiography and fiction. Roth's post-Zuckerman books, specifically <i>Operation Shylock: A Confession</i>, create not only a text of the self and a countertext of the other, but also countertexts to the text of the self. While such a postmodern awareness of the self is both honest and potentially liberating, there is nonetheless a danger in losing a sense of self and community. In <i>Operation Shylock</i>, Roth attempts to come to terms with this problem by anchoring questions of identity largely within the Jewish ethnic community. What is more, Roth's text demonstrates that the relationship between autobiography and fiction is most illustrative when it provides us with a means to observe how authors construct their reality and thereby their lives.
2012 Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
Roth's autobiographical <i>The Facts</i> (1988) and <i>Patrimony</i> (1991) are preoccupied with themes surfacing in the novel <i>Sabbath's Theater</i> (1995). There, the ghost of Sabbath's mother appears as the Lacanian "Real," an irruption into ordinary reality of death and mourning. In <i>The Facts</i>, the Real circulates around Besse Roth, in <i>Patrimony</i> around Herman Roth. But Sabbath contends less with the death of a mother than with an unresolved mourning of a brother and of a self unwittingly denied existence by his mother when his brother was killed in World War II. Finally sorting out these issues, Sabbath resolves not to commit suicide.
2012 Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
Philip Roth's <i>American Pastoral</i> contains a feminist subversion of its dominant male voices: the protagonist Swede Levov, the narrator Nathan Zuckerman, even author Roth. While reviews treat Swede as a good man punished for his virtues, the novel's women refute his reputation as the world's nicest guy. Swede's major faults are that he accepts the injustices of capitalism, that he never genuinely loves women, and that he does not think for himself. In creating ambiguity about his stance toward Swede, Roth may be admitting he has built a house of fiction that causes women to become bombmakers.
2012 Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
With <i>American Pastoral</i> Roth completes the assimilation story his fiction has previously been telling by rendering judgment upon its naive hopefulness. In rewriting Zuckerman's story through the story of Swede Levov, Roth rewrites his Zuckerman <i>Åuvre</i> to stage a reconciliation with the Jewish past his fiction has struggled to escape. Through his identification with Swede, Zuckerman at last surrenders to the demands of the Jewish father. When Swede dies we understand that Zuckerman in a sense has died too. Zuckerman's performing American self inhabits Swede's corpse to identify the Jew who remains.
2012 Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
My purpose in this essay is to place Philip Roth's <i>American Pastoral</i> in a context broader than that of the urban New Jersey milieu for which he is generally known. By contrasting this work with the two major novels of Bobbie Ann Mason, I weave together Roth's delineation of the rise and fall of the industrial northeast with Mason's saga of a similar period in the rural agricultural mid-south. In this way a total picture emerges of America's rise and decline in the period of the twentieth century through the aftermath of the Vietnam Warâwith some surprising similarities.
2012 Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
Philip Roth may well be a pornographer, but he is definitely and first of all a moralist. Obscenity in his tragic farces is only a way of imposing shock therapy on readers who, like many characters in his novels, might confuse propriety and reality. Truth is never clean, and therefore literature itself cannot be clean. For Roth, the phallus has thus become an artistic evidence of the salutary violence which is needed to restore a full consciousness of what Man and Life are truly about.
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