Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
214
result(s) for
"Parrish, Timothy"
Sort by:
Philip Roth's Deathmatch with Judaism
Philip Roth famously and frequently resisted being identified as aJewish writer, although he never resisted being identified as aJew and was a frequent critic of anti-Semitism. While Roth's work often depicts Jews arguing with each other, these conflicts have less to do with being Jewish, per se, than with howJudaism is conceived in the modern world. Criticized since his earliest stories for attacking Jews, Roth has rebelled against the practice ofJudaism. This essay explores Roth's conflict with the existence ofJudaism and the implicit communal demand that he abide by its historic practices.
Journal Article
The Cambridge companion to American novelists
\"This Companion examines the full range and vigor of the American novel. From the American exceptionalism of James Fenimore Cooper to the apocalyptic post-Americanism of Cormac McCarthy, these newly commissioned essays from leading scholars and critics chronicle the major aesthetic innovations that have shaped the American novel over the past two centuries. The essays evaluate the work, life and legacy of influential American novelists including Melville, Twain, James, Wharton, Cather, Faulkner, Ellison, Pynchon and Morrison, while situating them within the context of their literary predecessors and successors. The volume also highlights less familiar, though equally significant writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Djuna Barnes, providing a balanced and wide-ranging survey of use to students, teachers and general readers of American literature\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Plot Against Philip Roth
[...]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. 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. According to the Captain, this app, which soon will be available in most languages where literature is practiced, makes human intelligence more effectively artificial, which, he noted gleefully, means more like Shakespeare, whose genius is incomprehensible, though perhaps a little less mysterious now that we know that Shakespeare was really Middleton all the time. [...]he decides that since Israel became a state, most Americans prefer their Jews to be black rather than Jewish. Because he's uncertain whether Child's Law of the Tragic Mulatta transfers to male characters, and because he thinks a historically accurate version of The Thousand and One Nights would have Scheherazade dying her first night with the King, he chooses to have the male mulatta die in a spectacular auto accident with his white woman consort.
Journal Article
The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists
This Companion examines the full range and vigor of the American novel. From the American exceptionalism of James Fenimore Cooper to the apocalyptic post-Americanism of Cormac McCarthy, these newly commissioned essays from leading scholars and critics chronicle the major aesthetic innovations that have shaped the American novel over the past two centuries. The essays evaluate the work, life and legacy of influential American novelists including Melville, Twain, James, Wharton, Cather, Faulkner, Ellison, Pynchon and Morrison, while situating them within the context of their literary predecessors and successors. The volume also highlights less familiar, though equally significant writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Djuna Barnes, providing a balanced and wide-ranging survey of use to students, teachers and general readers of American literature.
eBook
Old Obfuscations and New Conversations
[...]possible conversations were made especially poignant in recent years by the confluence ofseveral factors, including the decidedly theological frame ofsome of Roth's late novels, Roth's own ritual-less funeral, the publication of Blake Bailey's salacious biography, and our general, almost childlike dismay at what seems to us to be the growing inability of contemporary literary scholarship to take religion and theology seriously. [...]our motivation for this Special Issue is bringing together religiously literate and religiously insightful scholars to think and write about one of our favorite subjects, Philip Roth. In the second essay in his book In Bluebeard's Castle (1971), George Steiner notes that Jews are unique-and therefore often despised-not actually for their ethnic self-isolation (the same observation could be made concerning many of the world's peoples) but because they are the bearers ofJudaism, a totally unique, world historical, world altering set of values, predicated on a form of ethical monotheism that invented and then universally imposed (through argument rather than arms-another deeply annoying quality) a set ofmoral responsibilities, laws, and obligations upon all the nations ofthe earth. Steiner notes (the final quote is Nietzsche's), \"In polytheism [. . .] lay the freedom of the human spirit, its creative multiplicity. The doctrine ofa single Deity, whom men cannot play offagainst other gods and thus win open spaces for their own aims, is 'the most monstrous of all human errors'\" (38).
Journal Article
The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth
From the moment that his debut book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), won him the National Book Award, Philip Roth has been among the most influential and controversial writers of our age. Now the author of more than twenty novels, numerous stories, two memoirs, and two books of literary criticism, Roth has used his writing to continually reinvent himself and in doing so to remake the American literary landscape. This Companion provides the most comprehensive introduction to his works and thought in a collection of newly commissioned essays from distinguished scholars. Beginning with the urgency of Roth's early fiction and extending to the vitality of his most recent novels, these essays trace Roth's artistic engagement with questions about ethnic identity, postmodernism, Israel, the Holocaust, sexuality, and the human psyche itself. With its chronology and guide to further reading, this Companion will be essential for new and returning Roth readers, students and scholars.
eBook
Ralph Ellison and the Genius of America
Ralph Ellison has long been admired as the author of one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century, Invisible Man. Yet he has also been dismissed by some critics as a writer who only published one major work of fiction and a black intellectual out of touch with his times. In this book, Timothy Parrish offers a fundamentally different assessment of Ellison’s legacy, describing him as the most important American writer since William Faulkner and someone whose political and cultural achievements have not been fully recognized. Embracing jazz artist Wynton Marsalis’s characterization of Ellison as the unacknowledged “political theorist” of the civil rights movement, Parrish argues that the defining event of Ellison’s career was not Invisible Man but the 1954 Supreme Court decision that set his country on the road to racial integration. In Parrish’s view, no other American intellectual, black or white, better grasped the cultural implications of the new era than Ellison did; no other major American writer has been so misunderstood. Drawing on Ellison’s recently published “unfinished” novel, newly released archival materials, and unpublished correspondence, Parrish provides a sustained reconsideration of the writer’s crucial friendships with Richard Wright, Robert Penn Warren, and C. Vann Woodward to show how his life was dedicated to creating an American society in which all could participate equally. By resituating Ellison’s career in the historical context of its making, Parrish challenges the premises that distorted the writer’s reception in his own lifetime to make the case for Ellison as the essential visionary of post–Civil War America.
eBook
CORMAC MCCARTHY FOR THE AGES
Introducing Lydia R. Cooper's \"Cormac McCarthy's The Road as Apocalyptic Grail Narrative,\" first published in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 43, No. 2, summer 2011, pp. 218-36. Cooper yields to this impulse when, drawing on Baudrillard's critique of the West, she suggests that after 9/11 \"worlds burning and turning to ash\" reflect the \"American public's fear that the pursuit of political, global ascendency is in itself an act of violence whose backlash will be both staggering in its magnitude and inexorable in its execution\" (222). The novel's premise requires that the reader consent to the proposition that The Road has become the only world the reader can know. [...]students need not have read deeply in Melville or Nietzsche or Homer, as McCarthy has, to be struck by the novel's intense immediacy.
Journal Article
