Philip Roth Studies 

About: Philip Roth Studies is an academic journal published by Purdue University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Judaism & Narrative. It has an ISSN identifier of 1547-3929. Over the lifetime, 280 publications have been published receiving 989 citations.

The Concept of Irony

Abstract: Using the concept of romantic irony theorized by F. Schlegel and Kierkegaard, the author interprets gender in Jane Austen's Emma and Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater, showing how ideas of masculinity and femininity have been thoroughly undermined and that, in a vital ironic gesture, nothing has been allowed to replace them.

Anatole Broyard's Human Stain: Performing Postracial Consciousness

Abstract: If we are to move beyond racism we shall have, in the end, to move beyond current racial identities.-K. Anthony AppiahPhilip Roth's novel The Human Stain (2000) traces the rise and fall of Coleman Silk, an African American boxer-turned-professor who has passed for most of his adult life as Jewish and (in this context) as white.1 Many commentators have noted that Roth based the character of Coleman on Anatole Broyard, an influential New York Times literary critic and Greenwich Village man-about-town, yet no one has (to my knowledge) examined Broyard s criticism of Roth's works or Broyard's fascinating fiction and essays to shed light on the curious mix of concealment and disclosure that characterizes Coleman's passing. In Broyard's works, there are a series of cryptic references to passing that could be explained away as nods to the self-fashioning of the heady post-World War II era, when shedding the bland past was, if not a national pastime, certainly a common Village event. These allusions in Broyard's work are emblematic of how Coleman, in Roth's novel, thrives on the secrecy of passing. By modeling Coleman on Broyard, then, Roth argues that the creation of the self (or of many selves) requires and feeds off of a multicolored carousel of disclosure and concealment. That is, Roth was careful to choose a man who cultivated a persona that broadcasted a rich array of ambiguous signs as his template for Coleman precisely so that he could drive home his point that all coming of age involves adopting, in Broyards terms, a set of fictions about the self. Because he demonstrated the performativity of race, Broyard offered a perfect model for Roth's main character.2In a presentation at the Center for Democracy in a Multiracial Society at the University of Illinois, George Lipsitz argued that instead of identity determining politics, politics should ground identities. In a similar vein, Michael Rothberg takes posthistoricism (or postmodernism) to task for denuding politics: "In the name of politicizing identity, posthistoricism actually depoliticizes difference." These recent evaluations of identity politics point to a new movement away from the multiculturalist insistence on difference and perhaps herald a new turn toward a postracial consciousness where identities need not be grounded primarily in race.3 Indeed, by some accounts, we (in the United States) are demographically approaching an era where racial categories will literally break down. Roth's The Human Stain contributes to this turn toward postracialism by arguing that identity should be fluid and that the good intentions of the multiculturalists can sometimes be thwarted by a rapidly outdated adherence to what K. Anthony Appiah terms "current racial identities" (32). I have argued elsewhere that Roth's The Human Stain claims that we need to think of race outside of racial categories to overcome racism (see Kaplan). In this essay, I extend that argument by asserting that precisely because Roth used Broyard as the model for Coleman, The Human Stain can be read as a treatise on how the concept of race should be fluid. Because Broyard refused to be classified, he offered Roth an opportunity to explore how racial identities can be surpassed and to imagine a postracial consciousness where the limiting identitarian strictures that feed racism can be abolished.To demonstrate how Broyard's particular relationship to passing-his refusal to allow racial identities to limit him-functioned in his life and writings as well as in Coleman's character, I briefly summarize Roth's The Human Stain, examine how Broyard performed his elected identity, turn to Broyard's readings of Roth's works, and analyze some of Broyard's essays and short stories. I conclude with an exploration of the echoes of Broyard in The Human Stain. I should note here that I use the word passing throughout this essay for want of a better term; indeed, Broyard and Coleman (or rather, Roth) both avoid this term because it continues the notion of discrete races that both try to negate. …

"You're Neither One Thing (N)or The Other": Nella Larsen, Philip Roth, and The Passing Trope

Abstract: Philip Roth has always been placed in a male literary tradition, one that includes the likes of Henry James, Franz Kafka, Saul Bellow, and Bernard Malamud, among others. Over the past decade, since the publication of his novel The Human Stain (2000), critics have started situating him in an African American literary tradition as well. For example, Matthew Wilson elucidates the "surprising continuities" between Charles Chesnutt's and Philip Roth's narratives of passing (138). Some critics have also started tracing structural similarities between The Human Stain and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952).1 Roth himself reveals his fondness for Ellison in his autobiography The Facts (1988). While it is laudable that literary critics have been expanding the traditions that Roth fits in, they still overlook the ways in which he is in conversation with women writers. More specifically, they neglect to address the myriad connections between African American women writers and Roth. This omission is surprising, considering the recent critical trend of placing The Human Stain in an African American literary tradition of passing narratives-a tradition populated by many black women writers.2Perhaps the most canonized text in this subgenre of literature is Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), which is the story of Clare Kendry's race shifting and her friendship with Irene Redfield. It is this novel that my paper analyzes alongside The Human Stain-a contemporary work on racial passing. This essay answers questions that have remained unanswered: What happens when Roth is placed in tandem with a female writer, not to prove arbitrary matters of influence or genealogies, but to define a critical tradition? More specifically, how can assessing two narratives of racial passing reveal the twentieth-century literary imagination of narrating phenotypically ambiguous bodies? On a thematic level, both novels are similarly preoccupied with passing-defined as "appear[ing] to belong to one or more social subgroups other than the one(s) to which one is normally assigned" (Moynihan 8). Yet Roth expands this definition by raising questions not only about race, but also about education, anonymity, and death-themes that form the underlying structure of the twentieth-century passing plot. My essay examines these themes by juxtaposing Passing with The Human Stain to argue that Roth revises the conventional passing narrative, a feat which critics have largely ignored. More specifically, this connection elucidates the life of the passing character, as one that begins with a race-less childhood and ends with ambiguous death. Regardless of the books' seven-decade separation and literary critics' inclination to limit these novels to their respective traditions, this article unites Passing and The Human Stain within the same genealogy.Although my essay reads Roth alongside Larsen, there is no evidence that he has read her work. According to Roth, the plot of The Human Stain came from his time as a graduate student, when he dated a "Negro" girl from a family of "pale Negroes" who sometimes passed. Roth also says that he "never imagined" that hearing a firsthand account of passing would be a story for him decades later, yet the tale of "[s]elf-transformation. Self-invention. The alternative destiny. Repudiating the past" made "a lasting impression" on him (McGrath 8). The "impression" gleaned from this interview is that Roth's novel is based solely on his decades-old knowledge of passing and not on Larsen's novel. Yet his failure to admit reading any passing novels should not obviate the comparisons between his text and Larsen's, especially since his work revises basic elements of the tradition while revealing the plot trajectory common to it. Whether or not he has read Larsen is difficult to ascertain; more fruitful is what each novel highlights about the development of mixedraced bodies in twentieth-century literature.Race Learning: Belated Realization of Blackness Leads to PassingOne key element that these two novels share is their reliance on the figure of the sheltered son to answer the basic question: Why do people pass? …

Exit Ghost and the Politics of "Late Style"

Abstract: " Exit Ghost and the Politics of 'Late Style'" explores how Roth's final Zuckerman novel reflects the condition Edward Said identified as "late style." The essay considers how Said's conception of late style offers a useful lens for reading Exit Ghost as it helps account for the troubling aesthetic and the political implications that are contained within Zuckerman's sudden departure.

Family Systems Theory as Literary Analysis: The Case of Philip Roth

Abstract: Psychoanalytic theory has been more influential in literary studies than any other model of psychological inquiry. Although psychoanalysis' is by far the most prevalent school of psychology-both theoretical and clinical-in the West, there are perhaps additional reasons as to why it has retained such a monopoly in American English departments. Dedicated to the liberal arts, literary scholars understandably identify with Freud's appeal to literature and Lacans semiotic formulation diat the unconscious is structured like a language. Psychoanalysis, which Mark Poster deems "a theory of the individual" (34), is expressly subjective in its reliance on free association, transference between the analyst and the analysand, and an implicit understanding of the patient's victimization by his or her innate desires or deficiencies. It therefore seems more akin to the theoretical teachings of postmodernism and poststructuralism, which stress the significance of the individual experience and are resistant to generalization, categorization, and universalism. Despite these apparent mutual pursuits, psychoanalysis is not die only available and viable psychological approach to literature. In this essay, I propose an additional, but not necessarily alternate, psychological discourse by which to analyze literary texts, using the early fiction of Philip Roth as a test case.Family systems theory, while relatively new and unfamiliar to most humanities scholars, offers great potential for performing psychological literary criticism outside the psychoanalytic framework. Its goal is to demonstrate that the study of the human can be objective, or, in other words, a science.2 To formulate his theoretical claims about the psychological identity of the family, Murray Bowen and his colleagues relied on an extensive collection of data about both human and animal families. Bowen's assertion that the "family is a system in that a change in one part of the system is followed by compensatory change in other parts of the system" (155) makes a universal claim that seems, at least on the surface, antihumanities. In our postmodern age of Foucauldian subjectivity and Derridian deconstruction, the universality of a systemic science of humanity seems suspect. Yet it cannot be denied that, as humans, we maintain a common experience of existence. What family systems theory attempts to do is provide a comprehensive model that recognizes the common origin of our species: the mammalian organization of the family. C. Margaret Hall summarizes it as "a general theory of emotional processes in human relationship systems, with an emphasis on biological rather than cultural variables" (2). Viewing the family as an organic unit, the theory recognizes governing patterns by which a family manages its anxiety. These patterns are not grounded in myth or literature but in biology and sociology.Although systems theory may be a more conventionally scientific understanding of the human psyche, this does not discount its potential as a theoretical construct for literary analysis. Because it is a theory arguably more grounded in a lived, universal human experience, it may offer a more convincing psychological paradigm for literature written across boundaries of nationality, ethnicity, race, and gender. This essay, therefore, seeks to illustrate how family systems theory can function as a critical framework by focusing on two of Philip Roth's early novels, When She Was Good (1967) and Portnoy's Complaint (1969). Roth's fiction is an especially productive case to consider, given his lifelong personal and professional interest in Freud's work, his disappointment with the practice of psychoanalysis, and his exploration of the self within the context of the family. Given that Roth himself admits that a major recurrent subject of his novels is "family and religion as coercive forces" ("Writing" 8), his fiction invites a theoretical reading that acknowledges the family as a unit of psychological activity. …