Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria

The hermeneutics of suspicion is a term coined by Paul Ricoeur to describe the practice of reading texts against the grain to expose their repressed or hidden meanings. This essay examines the distinctive features of such a hermeneutics as they have shaped literary theory and criticism in recent decades. Suspicious reading, it proposes, is not only an intellectual exercise in demystification, but also a critical style and scholarly sensibility that offers specific pleasures. These pleasures include the aesthetic and ethical satisfactions of fashioning detectivefictionstyle plots. The literary critic, like the detective, interprets clues, establishes causal connections, and identifies a guilty party: namely, the literary work accused of whitewashing or concealing social oppression. Deconstructionist critics like Shoshana Felman seek to expose the dangers of such a suspicious hermeneutics but remain thoroughly entangled in the very method they seek to repudiate. The goal of the essay, then, is not to critique and be suspicious of suspicion. Rather, it seeks to take the hermeneutics of suspicion seriously and to understand why it has proved so attractive to contemporary scholars. At the same time, it also suggests that the presentday ubiquity and predictability of this critical method makes its claims to intellectual novelty or political boldness ever harder to sustain. Recent discussions of affect (Radway 1997; Thrailkill 2007) have emphasized literary criticism’s distrust of emotion, but there is little acknowledgment of criticism’s own affective registers. How are method and mood, argument and attitude intertwined? The typical Introduction to Criticism and Theory course in the United States or United Kingdom classifies its content according to intellectual tenets or political convictions (deconDownloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf by guest on 14 May 2019 216 Poetics Today 32:2 struction, queer theory, psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies). Yet styles of academic reading are affective as well as cognitive, inviting us to adopt attitudes of trust, impatience, reverence, or wariness toward the texts we read. Academic criticism contains its own structures of preevaluation (Smith 1995), encouraging readers to adopt a certain disposition and to approach texts in a specific frame of mind. In presentday literary studies, this frame of mind is frequently one of wariness, vigilance, and distrust. Drawing on Suzanne Keen’s invitation to think of genre as an “affectproducing template,” I apply this idea to contemporary academic genres of suspicious reading. What are the distinctive formal devices and rhetorical strategies of a hermeneutic of suspicion? And how do these features help establish an affectladen as well as analytic relation to texts? Suspicious reading, I argue, is not just an intellectual exercise in demystification but also a distinctive style and sensibility with its own specific pleasures.1 The hermeneutics of suspicion is a phrase coined by Paul Ricoeur, who famously identified Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as the founders of a “school of suspicion,” the primary architects of a distinctively modern style of interpretation that is driven by a desire to demystify, an adamant refusal to take words at face value. In spite of their many differences, Ricoeur (1970: 32) argues, these thinkers share a common commitment to reducing “the illusions and lies of consciousness.” What drives such a hermeneutic is the conviction that appearances are deceptive, that texts do not gracefully relinquish their meanings, that manifest content shrouds darker, more unpalatable truths. It is a mode of interpretation that adopts a distrustful attitude toward texts in order to draw out meanings or implications that are not intended and that remain inaccessible to their authors as well as to ordinary readers. In his argument, Ricoeur develops a key distinction between a hermeneutics of trust, which is driven by a sense of reverence and goes deeper into the text in search of revelation, and a hermeneutics of suspicion, which adopts an adversarial sensibility to probe for concealed, repressed, or disavowed meanings (ibid.: 9). The difference between these approaches, we might say, is the difference between unveiling and unmasking. Ricoeur’s model of a suspicious hermeneutics offers a valuable reference point for assessing the recent history of literary studies in the wake of several waves of literary and cultural criticism that have encouraged styles of vigilant and mistrustful reading. Here we can point to the influence of structuralist and poststructuralist modes of thought, with their builtin 1. This essay focuses on the suspicious dimensions of contemporary styles of criticism. It does not address the related issue of how works of literature encourage suspicion in readers via the use of techniques such as unreliable narrators. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf by guest on 14 May 2019 Felski • Suspicious Minds 217 wariness of commonsense or everyday meaning; the impact of an identity politics of race, gender, and sexuality that encouraged readings of canonical texts against the grain in order to expose their hidden biases; the influence of Marxism via the models of symptomatic reading developed by Macherey (1975), Jameson (1981), and others, and, finally, the takenforgranted nature of Freudian schemata, which made it easy for scholars to transfer such schemata to the study of literature and culture via analogies such as the political unconscious. The hermeneutics of suspicion, in other words, is a term applicable to a diverse range of critical frameworks. While psychoanalytical feminism, New Historicism, and postcolonial criticism, to name just a few current approaches, are characterized by obvious differences in focus and method, they share the conviction that the most rigorous reading is one that is performed against the grain, that the primary rationale for reading a text is to critique it by underscoring what it does not know and cannot understand. The influence of such approaches, moreover, reaches well beyond the confines of literature departments; when anthropologists unmask the covert imperialist convictions of their predecessors, when sociologists read the texts of Weber, Marx, or Durkheim against the grain, when legal scholars challenge the purported neutrality of the law to lay bare its hidden agendas, they all subscribe to a style of interpretation driven by a spirit of disenchantment. To be sure, not all literary theory manifests an adversarial and distrustful attitude to the literary work. Indeed, quite a few voices—often those associated with deconstruction or with recent Lévinasinspired work on the ethics of reading—extol the alterity of literary texts, testifying to their radical singularity and enigmatic strangeness. And yet suspicion is not so much dissipated in such arguments as it is displaced. We do not need to be suspicious of the text, in other words, because it is already doing the work of suspicion for us, because it is engaged in the negative work of subverting the selfevident, challenging the commonplace, relentlessly questioning idées fixes and idées recus. The literary text thus matches and exceeds the critic’s own vigilance, performing a metacommentary on the traps of interpretation, a knowing anticipation and exposure of all possible hermeneutic blunders. Critic and work are bound together in an alliance of heightened mistrust visàvis commonsensical forms of language and thought (Felski 2009). While the term hermeneutics of suspicion with its obligatory footnote to Ricoeur, is often invoked in current literary debates, the features of such a hermeneutics have, until recently, received attention mainly from scholars working in religious studies, intellectual history, legal theory, and related fields (Stewart 1989; Thiele 1991; Bermann 2001; Josselson 2004; Farmer Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf by guest on 14 May 2019 218 Poetics Today 32:2 2007). In the current climate of retrospection, however, as critics reflect on the intellectual legacy of recent decades and reassess methods of reading that have come to seem stale and unsurprising, the hermeneutics of suspicion is shifting from a mode of analysis to an object of analysis within literary studies. A style of interpretation that once seemed entirely selfevident and selfexplanatory now finds itself squirming under the spotlight (Sedgwick 1997; Latour 2004; Strowick 2005; Best and Marcus 2009; Felski 2009; Love 2010). Why do so many scholars feel impelled to unmask and demystify the works that they read? What sustains their certainty that a text is withholding some vital information, that they must authorize their commentary by highlighting what is concealed, repressed, unsaid? Such convictions owe much, as I have noted, to contemporary styles of intellectual politics that, following the reception of Althusser, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault and others, have largely relinquished affirmative or utopian projects of worldbuilding in favor of the rhetoric of subversion, estrangement, and critique. The U.S. reception of French theory, François Cusset (2008: 83) observes, helped to encourage a “suspicion without limits” in which scholars increasingly edged away from any espousal of positive values or norms, preferring to present themselves as “champions of subversion.” The pervasiveness of this mindset also testifies to the increasing pressures of professionalization and the scramble to shore up academic authority: the hermeneutics of suspicion, after all, assigns a unique depth of understanding to the trained reader or theorist, equipped to see through the illusions in which others are immersed. According to John Farrell (2006: 4), this radical 

On suspicious minds.

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

Long Day"s Journey into Night의 재현된 과거 : 기억의 반응과 행위의 읽기

ABSTRACT: Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater (1995), a late work that registers a marked ethical turn in the author’s canon, details the memory of trauma in both content and form. It is this profound investment in memory that makes the protagonist Sabbath worthy of attention and even respect, notwithstanding his reprehensible conduct. Given that Sabbath’s Theater is heavily invested in the logic of traumatic memory, the novel preeminently invites a psychoanalytic interpretation, though its protagonist himself more than once expresses his wariness of therapy in general. Therefore, the crucial step toward such a critical intervention involves exploring the relationship between trauma, ethics, and psychoanalysis. The present paper seeks to examine Roth as an ethical thinker who in the confines of the novel enlarges our understanding of the workings of the human psyche by sidestepping the clinical scientism of psychoanalytic discourse and strategically redefining therapy as an empowering philosophy of life.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5703/philrothstud.13.1.0093

Trauma, Ethics and Psychoanalysis in Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater

FEMINISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS"The fact is that to [him] [. . .] women [are] a strange, inferior, less-than- human species. He [sees] them as childlike dolls, who existed in terms only of man's love, to love man and serve his needs" (Friedan 108). This is not another rebuke of Philip Roth's alleged misogyny, although it may remind us of Hermione Lee's provocative statement that, in Roth's novels, "nearly all the women [. . .] are there to obstruct, or to help, or to console the male characters" (Reading 132), or David Gooblar's assessment that feminist critics have usually deemed Roth's female characters as inferior to his male characters, "mere types, never rising to the complexity or depth of the fully human" (8). The opening allegation is not, in fact, taken from Roth criticism at all, but rather encapsulates Betty Friedan's estimation of Sigmund Freud in her 1963 feminist classic The Feminine Mystique. Decades later, Nancy Chodorow still admits, "Freud was indeed sexist. He wrote basically from a male norm and ignored women. [. . .] He talks, for instance, about women's lesser sense of justice, of their jealousy, shame, vanity, and lack of contribution to civilization as if these were clinical findings" (172). Evidently, charges of sexism and misogyny abound both in Freud and in Roth criticism (Young-Bruehl and Wexler 455; Shostak 112; Gooblar 7). Both have been accused either of neglecting and distorting the female point of view or even of disseminating images of femininity that have proved damaging to the cause of feminism. Roth's allegiance to Freud could thus easily be seen as the bedrock of his own sexist inclinations.However, such an assessment would jump too quickly from superficial readings of Freud and Roth to a questionable conclusion. Instead, I will argue here that Roth's feminism-his critique of rigid gender roles and sexual politics-is particularly acute where he openly engages with Freud. This argument is far less surprising than the statement by Friedan or the opinions summarized by Lee and Gooblar suggest. First of all, Roth's works have already been associated with feminism. Julie Husband, for instance, notes that Roth's early novels "offer an intriguing view of Roth's struggle with second-wave feminism," in developing "forceful," albeit ambivalent, "critiques of patriarchy" (25-26). Defending When She Was Good (1967), Sam Girgus claims that the novel "suggests that for Roth becoming a man and achieving true sexual and personal liberation require a culture of freedom for women as well" (153), thus also aligning Roth with contemporary feminist politics. Furthermore, several critics have demonstrated how Roth uses subtle narrative techniques to deconstruct the sexism flaunted by his characters. A close reading shows that one-dimensional or stereotypical portrayals of women, which appear frequently in Roth's work, can be traced back to a male character's limited or flawed perspective. Debra Shostak has pointed out that, for "these very reasons, [. . .] Roth's work can appear as much a prescient critique of misogynist attitudes as a purveyor of them" (112). In a mock trial staged between Philip and his mistress in Deception (1990), the writer responds to the charge of sexism and the claim that all his women are "vicious stereotypes" (110) in the following way: "[Y]ou may do your own sex a disservice when you postulate intelligent young women as lacking the courage to be desirable-as having no aggression, no imagination, no daring, no adventurousness, and no perversity" (111). In addition, then, Roth's portrayals of desirous and aggressive women, which have often been counted among these "vicious stereotypes," may add a crucial dimension to a more complex vision of womanhood often occluded by images of female virtue and demureness.Secondly, even the most vehement feminist opponents of Freud, among them Betty Friedan and Kate Millett, have appropriated psychoanalysis for analyzing sexism (Young-Bruehl and Wexler 456). …

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5703/philrothstud.13.1.0013

A Psychopathology of Everyday Women: Psychoanalytic Aesthetics and Gender Politics in Letting Go and "The Psychoanalytic Special"

ROTH, CHEKHOV, AND A GUNIn Philip Roth's The Humbling (2009), actor Simon Axler suddenly and inexplicably loses his magic. Axler is devastated and, much like Mickey Sabbath before him, contemplates suicide throughout the novel without finding the means to go through with it. Only when he intuits that he will have to act a 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 The Seagull"' (139-40). Axler finally shoots himself just as Treplev does in Anton Chekhov's play. Accordingly, Claudia Roth Pierpont remarks: "[T]his is a man who keeps a gun in his attic, and knows his Chekhov" (309).Pierpont alludes to "Chekhov's gun," a principle of plot-construction that, according to Roth's own Nathan Zuckerman, refers to "Chekhov's famous dictum that a pistol hanging on the wall in Act One must eventually go off in Act Three" (Counterlife 108). The gun goes off in both The Seagull and The Humbling, but the apparently indispensable Konstantin Treplev is a troubling plot device in Roth's novel. The protagonist of Chekhov's comedy The Seagull (Chayka, 1895) aspires to be a great, innovative writer and to win the heart of his beloved, but when he fails as an artist and as a lover, he kills himself. Treplev commits suicide because he has never found his magic-arguably a fitting counterpart to Axler's dilemma. On still closer inspection, however, Axler's accomplishment looks more curious: Chekhov's 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 suicide in the concluding scene of The Seagull. The puzzling question is therefore: How could Axler enact a suicide that is never properly performed? How could he kill himself as Treplev, considering that whoever plays Chekhov's character never holds a pretend gun, never pulls a pretend trigger, never pretends to kill himself onstage?Anton Chekhov's influence on Roth can be tracked throughout much of his career. Roth has taught college courses on Chekhov; he has adapted Chekhov's last play The Cherry Orchard for a production with Claire Bloom and attempted to adapt the short story "The Name-Day Party" for television (Pierpont 76, 142, 102). Chekhov is also a continual reference point in Roth's original fiction: in "'I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting'; or, Looking at Kafka," Aunt Rhoda gets a part in Chekhov's Three Sisters, a 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 The Prague Orgy (14, 59). Chekhov's story "He and She" provides a 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 Chekhov" (Ghost 13), had already testified to the fact that Zuckerman is no less knowledgeable about Chekhov than David Kepesh, who, in The Professor of Desire, is immersed in Chekhov's story worlds while he struggles with a 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 a more obvious foundation for acting out his suicide-among them even Chekhov's Ivanov, in which the eponymous protagonist shoots himself onstage before the final curtain-it is surprising that Roth resorts to The Seagull to finish off his novel and his character. Adding further to the riddles of this intertextual connection, Axler himself comes up with a list of suicide plays, musing about their curious abundance in canonical literature and wondering whether suicide is "a formula fundamental to the drama" (Humbling 39). …

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5703/philrothstud.12.2.0025

Philip Roth's Chekhovian Formula: Suicide and Art in the Humbling and the Seagull

Philip Roth’s attitude towards psychoanalysis has been described as being highly critical and increasingly antagonistic. Portnoy’s Complaint and episodes from Deception , Patrimony , and Sabbath’s Theater , however, suggest that there may be another way of looking at Roth’s engagement with the discipline: exploiting its ludic components, Roth plays with therapeutic moments in his novels and develops his characteristic take on dialogue, role-playing, topic, and style in a playful interaction with psychoanalysis.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5703/philrothstud.11.1.35

"What It Adds Up To, Honey, Is Homo Ludens!": Play, Psychoanalysis, and Roth's Poetics

In the fall of 2015, we discussed what it would mean to bring together some of the most respected minds in Roth Studies, scholars who have been writing about Roth for over a decade, with scholars just starting out. The goal was to unite everyone to attend a three-day seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference, a conference that Harvard University hosted the following spring. In order to produce a coherent proposal for the ACLA, we needed to articulate what over-arching qualities linked our colleagues.In addition to being avid readers of Roth and fascinated with theoretical inquiry, they share a commitment to dialogue, debate, and, above all, mentoring relationships. Given this latter quality-one of mutual interest in helping develop the next generation of Roth scholars-we thought it would be remarkable to unite everyone for lively debate that continued from one day to the next to the next. That we could further this conversation via a special journal issue seemed at that time only a fleeting possibility.Given such lofty goals, we also, necessarily, discussed how to make a convincing case for the acceptance of a seminar on Roth in particular, admittedly a singularly American author who, on the surface, seems as interested in representing America as he is uninterested in taking up theoretical questions, an important focal point of the ACLA. And even after persuading the ACLA and each other of Roth's relevance to an international and theoretically grounded audience, we remain, to this day, aware of persistent claims of Roth's insularity -most recently articulated as Roth's "narcissism"-which has become the ultimate criticism of this persistently relevant author.As recently as October 2016, for example, Liel Leibovitz wrote for Tablet a review of the film adaptation of American Pastoral subtitled, "Not even Ewan McGregor can turn the author's narcissism into a relatable work of art." Later, Leibovitz writes that a profound "sense of self-centeredness, ironically, grows clearer with each of the author's attempts to stride past the preoccupations of his youth and into bigger, bolder books that wrestle with the meaning of America." The criticism mirrors the 2008 remarks surrounding predictions about the Nobel Prize that year. Although permanent secretary of the Nobel prize jury, Horace Engdahl, did not name names in his overview of the trends in American literature, everyone believed he was referring to Roth when he proclaimed: "[t]he US is too isolated, too insular. They [. . .] don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature" (qtd. in Crouch).The criticism of Roth's "insularity" or even "narcissism" seemed perhaps too easy, even stereotypical, as Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi would later argue in a rejoinder to Leibovitz published in Tablet in December of 2016. Using the final scene of The Human Stain as an exemplary case of Roth's ethics in terms of the tension between humanity and time, Ezrahi argues: "The ultimate emblem of this relinquishing of the future while gesturing to the artifice of eternity is the frozen pond covering the river's flow at the end of The Human Stain." In other words, for Ezrahi, even the Rothian scenes that emphasize the natural world, as at the end of this important novel, look outward rather than inward in their worry about the continuous flow of human connection, forebodingly threatened, as revealed by the image of frozen water.For us, one of the most important ways in which Roth continues to look outward and may best be defended against charges of narcissism is his persistent pursuit of dialogue-with other writers, thinkers, and researchers-and the lively debate this has inspired in both literary studies and other disciplines. As a result, we chose for our seminar the title "Philip Roth's Transdisciplinary Translation" to highlight some of the stellar work in Roth Studies emerging from around the globe, from several national traditions and disciplinary points of view. …

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5703/philrothstud.13.1.0005

Introduction Philip Roth’s Transdisciplinary Translation

Editors' Note:Traveling with Roth Aimee Pozorski and Maren Scheurer This note begins not with text as one would expect from the editors of Philip Roth Studies, but with an image—an image Maren snapped seven years ago in Oradea, Romania, as Aimee delivered a paper at one of our several Roth Society sponsored international gatherings that members of the Philip Roth Society hosted over the years. What is interesting about the image is not Aimee standing at a podium, but an overblown sketch of Philip Roth projected on the screen behind and above her, staring stoically at the conference attendees, or maybe looking over Aimee's shoulder in judgment of what she is about to say next. While taken at a very specific time and place—July 16, 2015, at Partium Christian University in Oradea, Romania—the image testifies to our experiences as co-editors throughout the last four years. When we say that we "Travel with Roth," we do not simply mean that Roth's works, and Roth's sensibility itself, are always with us—although that is also true. It is no exaggeration to say that at some point during every day, we have Roth on our minds—what he would say about our editing choices, how he might disagree with our takes on various issues surrounding his catalog, whether we are doing right by his legacy. But, when we say we are travelers with Roth, or traveling with Roth, we also mean that traveling the world in pursuit of Roth Studies has been one of the greatest joys of the last ten years. Click for larger view View full resolution We met at the Roth@80 conference. It is difficult to believe that was ten years ago: ten years of collaborating, supporting, commemorating, mentoring, conversing, deliberating, and commiserating. The occasion of our meeting seemed fortuitous. Philip Roth had orchestrated a collaboration between the Philip Roth Society and the Newark Preservation and Landmarks Committee to plan his eightieth birthday party, complete with the Weequahic High School Marching Band and tributes by leading thinkers and authors of our time. While much of that celebration has been described at length, one of our goals for this issue, [End Page 1] as we mark what would have been Roth's ninetieth birthday, is something much less considered: the legacy of the occasion itself. Gathered in Newark, New Jersey, on March 18 and 19 of 2013, were dozens of young Roth scholars, and some not so young Roth scholars, who made a commitment in the name of Roth to keep the conversation going. Pia Masiero was the first, a leader in our field in so many ways, bringing Roth scholars together in Venice, Italy, before that celebratory event in Newark. Then came Velichka Ivanova and Rémi Astruc at the Université de Cergy-Pontoise, uniting Roth scholars in France in 2012. After Roth@80, Claudia Franziska Brühwiler was the next to make the offering: she would host the following international conference in St. Gallen, Switzerland, where we picked up many more travelers and continued our travels around the globe. Then came Oradea, Romania, with Enikő Maior, then New York City, and so on down the line. Even when we were not able to travel in person, during the heights of the pandemic, we traveled in spirit, accepting the invitation of Professor Majeed Jadwe to give a joint digital talk at University of Anbar, Iraq. Traveling to such very different venues, and encountering Roth scholars from around the world, signifies something more than our individual wanderlust or even the vibrant activity of the Philip Roth Society. It says something about Roth as a "traveling author," as it were, whose work speaks to readers and scholars from backgrounds very different from the contexts within which we generally situate Roth. In Romania, we learned how Roth's depictions of antisemitism resonated with the national tensions in postwar, post-Soviet Eastern Europe, and in our conversations with Iraqi scholars, we discovered how much hope they put into the liberatory force of Roth's writing. That we are convening once again in Newark, New Jersey, a decade later, the significance of it all is... 

Maren Scheurer

Papers

A Psychopathology of Everyday Women: Psychoanalytic Aesthetics and Gender Politics in Letting Go and "The Psychoanalytic Special"

Philip Roth's Chekhovian Formula: Suicide and Art in the Humbling and the Seagull

"What It Adds Up To, Honey, Is Homo Ludens!": Play, Psychoanalysis, and Roth's Poetics

Introduction Philip Roth’s Transdisciplinary Translation

Editors' Note: Traveling with Roth