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Lawless Exuberance: Céline and Roth
What did Philip Roth mean when he announced in a 1984 interview that “My Proust is Céline?” Could he have meant that the anti-Semite, collaborator, criminal, and disgraced writer triumphed over Proust in literary, thematic, and even moral purpose? If so, how? This paper investigates the origins of Roth’s statement, his reading of Céline through Kristeva’s concept of abjection, and his incorporation of Célinesque elements in his fiction and criticism, notably in his short story, “On the Air” (1970). Céline essentially permitted Roth to embrace transgression, which, in turn, allowed Roth to expand his candid writing about topics that violated social and sexual norms in America of the late sixties and beyond. Roth successfully avoided the negative aspects of Céline by deciding to celebrate his language and style rather than admit his failings. He effectively separated the literary from the political and overlooked how race determined Céline’s poetics. Ironically, Roth’s acceptance of Céline reflected some of his own values: directness, clarity of purpose, and descriptive detail. This literary approach allowed Roth to suspend his “Jewish conscience” in his reading and writing practices and understanding of literary inheritance.
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
Promiscuous
The publication ofPortnoy's Complaintin 1969 provoked instant, powerful reactions. It blasted Philip Roth into international fame, subjected him to unrelenting personal scrutiny and conjecture, and shocked legions of readers-some delighted, others appalled. Portnoy and other main characters became instant archetypes, and Roth himself became a touchstone for conflicting attitudes toward sexual liberation, Jewish power, political correctness, Freudian language, and bourgeois disgust. What about this book inspired Richard Lacayo ofTimeto describe it as \"a literary instance of shock and awe,\" and the Modern Library to list it among the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century?
Bernard Avishai offers a witty exploration of Roth's satiric masterpiece, based on the prolific novelist's own writings, teaching notes, and personal interviews. In addition to discussing the book's timing, rhetorical gambit, and sheer virtuousity, Avishai includes a chapter on the Jewish community's outrage over the book and how Roth survived it, and another on the author's scorching treatment of psychoanalysis. Avishai shows that Roth's irreverent novel left us questioning who, or what, was the object of the satire. Hilariously, it proved the serious ways we construct fictions about ourselves and others.
eBook
Philip Roth and the American liberal tradition
This book offers a combined historical and aesthetic analysis of five novels from Philip Roth's later career. It reads these works in the context of political, cultural, and literary developments in America from the New Deal to the present.
eBook
Why Do You Have to Look So Jewish All the Time?
This article parses the role of the body in Howard Jacobson’s Kalooki Nights and the manner in which Jacobson satirically draws on antisemitic concepts of Jewish difference. The article explores the role of the body in Jacobson’s magnum opus and how the author deconstructs the binaries that define and separate Jews and non-Jews. It offers new close readings of the novel that focus on the protagonist’s failed marriages, and – following from David Brauner’s recent monograph-length study – brings into focus new ways in which Jacobson’s novel engages and departs from Philip Roth.
Journal Article
Philip Roth’s Politics of Freedom in the American Trilogy
Philip Roth’s oeuvre demonstrates a consistent historico-political preoccupation with America, though it becomes pronounced in his late works—the American Trilogy comprising American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1999), and The Human Stain (2000), and the other novels and novellas that followed it. Roth’s political project, which predominantly explores how freedom was undermined in America, aligns with a philosophical perspective on the longing for and loss of freedom of his characters, tragic heroes caught up in the tumultuous roller-coaster of contemporary American history. Roth’s evolving existential vision that assesses the human condition at the end of the American Century is borne out by his protagonists who double as embodiments of ideologies.
Journal Article