This essay suggests that, in his seldom-read "Juice or Gravy?" (1994), Roth surreptitiously dramatizes the conflict between predestination and volition, relative to biographical writing. Roth wrote "Juice or Gravy?" as the "Afterword to the Twenty-Fifth-Anniversary Edition" of Portnoy's Complaint (1969), though he previewed the essay in the New York Times Book Review (18 Sept. 1994).1 "Juice or Gravy" has garnered sparse commentary among Roth scholars, perhaps because of its elusive significance. Roth, ostensibly recalling the early days of his career as a writer, remembers having visited a cafeteria where one of the workers would incessantly ask "Juice or gravy?" ("Afterword" 283) in order to top off the patron's serving of roast beef. Roth also claims to have found, in that cafeteria, a piece of paper containing nineteen arbitrary sentences that became the first lines of his major novels. Incredible, to be sure. Moreover, not a single reference to Portnoy's Complaint exists in "Juice or Gravy?", even though readers might have expected an afterword to an anniversary printing of the novel to offer commentary on the misguided biographical readings that greeted its initial publication in 1969. "Juice or Gravy?" appears to do none of that, and one suspects that confusion over the meaning and publication venue of the odd 1994 afterword led to its excision from subsequent 1994 printings of the novel. Indeed, most 1994 editions available today (as listed by Internet book dealers) do not contain the postscript.2Still, I will argue here that the afterword certainly pertains to the early reception of Portnoy's Complaint, insofar as "Juice or Gravy?" draws, beyond the fatalism of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846), on Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943, L'etre et le neant) to parody misguided biographical-that is to say, fatalistic-readings that ignore the transformative and transcendent qualities of literary narrative. Whereas Poe advances a deterministic account of the writing process, Sartre (in his preMarxist era) champions composition as existential "free invention" (Sartre 518).3 Such contexts are consistent with one scholar's claim that "Juice and Gravy?" explores free will, determinism, and "the folly" of resorting to the accidents of experience "to find coherence in Roth's career," though these comments are made without reference to Sartre (Shostak 1-2).4 In a related vein, my attention to Poe and Sartre suggests, for reasons targeting the deterministic underpinnings of unqualified biographical interpretation, that "Juice or Gravy?" is an entirely apt, however philosophically esoteric, afterword to the twenty-fifth anniversary printing of Portnoy's Complaint.My attention to these texts and contexts takes account of the possibility that the "The Philosophy of Composition" is in some measure a hoax that discredits deterministic renderings of the creative process.5 So, too, I suggest, is "Juice or Gravy?", which commences with a matter-of-fact tone but which ultimately rivals Poe's specious, because fictitious and fatalistic, "The Philosophy of Composition." Roth's narrator, who makes a point of mentioning his (and, of course, Roth's) "M.A. in literature" ("Afterword" 277-78), would surely be familiar with Poe's claim about having composed "The Raven" (1845) by first writing its conclusion and by then working formulaically toward that end: "Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its denouement before anything be attempted with the pen." Hence, the reference to causation in Poe's essay: "It is only with the denouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention" (Poe, "Philosophy"13).Roth, in turn, commences at the opposite end of the causal spectrum: his narrator claims that nineteen of his works arose from arbitrary lines he found inscribed on a sheet of paper at a cafeteria, for each of which he then felt compelled to write a full narrative. …

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5703/philrothstud.12.2.0071

"Juice or Gravy?": —Philosophies of Composition by Roth, Poe, and Sartre

What follows is a bibliography of Philip Roth-related texts published during 2017, including critical works (books, book chapters, journal essays, and special journal issues). All entries will reflect the format as defined in the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook (2016). All sources are arranged in alphabetical order according to the author’s last name. Individual essays included in edited collections are grouped in “Book Chapters” and are crosslisted according to MLA style. Digital book editions, such as those designed for Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s Nook readers, are not included in this listing. Given the recent growth in e-book technology, digital versions of Roth’s texts are becoming standard practice. This being the case, none of these e-book versions are included in this bibliography. Readers and researchers can easily visit online booksellers to find digital editions.

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2017

The article argues that Philip Roth's Kepesh saga — The Breast (1972), The Professor of Desire (1997), and The Dying Animal (2001) — dramatically morphs, with regard to sexuality and imaginative flight, Sartre's account, in Being and Nothingness ( L'etre et le neant , 1943), of the origins and possibilities of consciousness and their relation to desire. Indeed, desire, the dominant theme of Roth's trilogy, corresponds to Sartrian outlooks on transcendent possibility or existential freedom. In Being and Nothingness , moreover, Roth appears to have located, identified with, and artistically transformed outlooks on consciousness and artistic creativity. Roth's inspiration for imagining a character who exists as a breast, sans body, may also have emerged from Sartre's treatise, the outlooks of which allow for better appreciation of the concerns and fictive possibilities suggested by The Professor of Desire and The Dying Animal .

Existential Kepesh and the Facticity of Existential Roth: The Breast, The Professor of Desire, and The Dying Animal

Ethics for Modern Life

What follows is a bibliography of Philip Roth-related texts published during 2015, including critical works (books, book chapters, journal essays, and special journal issues). All entries will reflect the format as defined in the third edition of the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing (2008). All sources are arranged in alphabetical order according to the author's last name. Individual essays included in edited collections are grouped in "Book Chapters" and are cross-listed according to MLA style.Digital book editions, such as those designed for Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble's Nook readers, are not included in this listing. Given the recent growth in e-book technology, digital versions of Roth's texts are becoming standard practice. This being the case, none of these e-book versions are included in this bibliography. Readers and researchers can easily visit online booksellers to find digital editions.BOOKSThe Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Eds.Basu, Ann. States of Trial,-Manhood in Philip Roth's America. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Print.Kaplan, Brett Ashley. Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Print.EDITED COLLECTIONS AND SPECIAL ISSUESKoy, Christopher E., Ed. "The Worldliness of Philip Roth." Special issue of Litteraria Pragensia: Studies in Literature and Culture 25:49 (2015). Print.BOOK CHAPTERSAarons, Vicki. "The Making of American Jewish Identities in Postwar American Fiction." The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Eds. Brauner and Stahler 43-53. Print.Batnitzky, Leora. "Beyond Theodicy? Joban Themes in Philip Roth's Nemesis." The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics, Hermeneutics. Eds. Leora Batnitzky and Ilona Pardes. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH. 2015. 213-24. Print.Budick, Emily Miller. "Ghostwriting the Holocaust: The Ghost Writer, The Diary, The Kindly Ones, and Me." The Subject of Holocaust Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2015. 19-36. Print.Furst, Lilian R. "Ritualized Bellyaching: Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint." Just Talk: Narratives of Psychotherapy. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2015. 57-70. Print.Loffler, Philipp. "A Singular Act of Invention': Storytelling, Pluralism, and Philip Roth's American Trilogy." Pluralist Desires: Contemporary Historical Fiction and the End of the Cold War. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2015. 97-126. Print.Mosher, Paul W and Jeffrey Berman. "Angry Acts and Counteracts in Philip Roth's Life and Art." Confidentiality and its Discontents: Dilemmas of Privacy in Psychotherapy. New York: Fordham UP, 2015. 82-104. Print.-. "The Angry Act: The Psychoanalyst's Breach of Confidentiality in Philip Roth's Life and Art." Confidentiality and its Discontents: Dilemmas of Privacy in Psychotherapy. New York: Fordham UP, 2015. 63-81. Print.Osmanovic, Sabina. "Dealing with Evanescence: The Motif of Old Age and the Crisis of Meaning in Philip Roth's The Dying Animal." Mapping the World of Anglo-American Studies at the Turn of the Century. Eds. Aleksandra NikCeviC-Batricevic and Marija Krivokapic. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2015. 175-81. Print.Pozorski, Aimee. "American Jewish Life Writing, Illness and the Ethics of Innovation." The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Eds. Brauner and Stahler 43-53. Print.Scanlan, Margaret. "Strange Times to Be a Jew: Alternative History After 9/11." Narrating 9/11: Fantasies of State, Security, and Terrorism. Eds. John Duvall and Robert Marzec. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins UP, 2015. 168-93. Print.Schreier, Benjamin. "Why Jews Aren't Normal: The Unrepresentable Future of Philip Roth's The Counterlife." The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History. New York: New York UP, 2015. 149-84. …

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5703/philrothstud.12.2.0111

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2015

What pertinence might the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre hold for Philip Roth’s brief but provocative contribution to Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary collection, “Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals: A Symposium” (1961), and for Roth’s attitude to Judaism and ethnic bias generally? The article suggests that ideas advanced in Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew (1946) helped Roth shape his symposium essay and, more importantly, his early skepticism about religious affiliation grounded in hatred and chauvinism rather than in living, generative faith. The association of Sartrean ideas — the distinction, in Being and Nothingness (1943), between Being in-itself and Being for-itself and Sartre’s views on anti-Semitism — figures in Roth’s comments on twentieth-century Jewish outlook and in his formulation of “Grossbartism.” This existential mix may owe something, as well, to the Heideggerian state of being “thrown” — insofar as Sartre appropriates the concept to discuss the prospect of being thrown into a trans-cultural state of tolerance, a state that Roth seems to desire for Jew and gentile alike.

James Duban

Papers

From Negative Identity to Existential Nothingness: Philip Roth and the Younger Jewish Intellectuals

Existential Kepesh and the Facticity of Existential Roth: The Breast, The Professor of Desire, and The Dying Animal

Existential Revision in Philip Roth's The Breast