Showing papers in "Philip Roth Studies in 2017"

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

Abstract: 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). …

Correcting Philip: Reading Franzen Reading Roth

Abstract: ABSTRACT:This essay suggests a number of points of contact between Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen. Focusing on the late 1990s, the essay situates the work of both authors within a broader climate of cultural pessimism over the state of the novel and the nation at the end of the century. Analyzing the cultural politics of Franzen's stylistic development in this period—from postmodern experimentation to \"tragic realism\"—the essay argues that Roth was a significant precursor with whom Franzen engaged both in his fiction and essays. Taking in the \"culture wars\" raging in the academy and beyond, and surveying both writers' preoccupation with the period's shifting conceptions of liberalism, the essay moves from broad critique to a close and speculative reading of The Corrections (2001).

In the Roth Archives: The Evolution of Philip Roth's Kepesh Trilogy

Abstract: As the least narratively coherent of Roth's recurrent narrators, David Kepesh is also one of Roth's most enigmatic characters. Perhaps this is excusable; Roth wrote the Kepesh novels during vastly different eras, and, as such, they reflect vastly different interests. For all the frustration this can induce in readers desiring a clearly-defined trilogy, arguably Kepesh's incongruity and ambiguity helped The Dying Animal (2001), the third and final novel in the Kepesh trilogy, receive a significant amount of scholarly attention in recent years. Velichka Ivanova and Debra Shostak are among the critics who convincingly interpret the novel as a critique of certain kinds of toxic masculinity. In addition, Shostak evaluates how the Kepesh trilogy "explore[s] the consequences for sexuality and self-concept when the gendered perspective of a consciousness shifts position" (Countertexts 7)-highlighting the ludic skittishness of the trilogy as a unit.Scholars have remarked very little on this skittishness and have largely considered the first two novels in the trilogy to be a faint embarassment. For example, in his monograph Philip Roth, David Brauner makes an indicative argument that "The Dying Animal is, along with the other Kepesh novels, among [Roth's] weaker work" (223). Whilst the increase in scholarly work done on The Dying Animal has mitigated this, little work on the previous two novels exists,2 resulting in an absence of scholarship that offers prolonged examinations of the construction of the books as a trilogy. As such, the gap between the first Kepesh novel (The Breast, 1972) and the second (The Professor of Desire, 1977) is particularly important insofar as it reflects a commitment on Roth's part to avoid a linear narrative of either surreal Kafkan fantasy or Bildungsroman character study.The rise in studies of the Kepesh novels (or, at least, the figure of Kepesh as represented in The Dying Animal) has been coterminous with scholarly usage of the Philip Roth Papers in the Library of Congress, an archive whose vast collections of Roth-related material remain underutilized in Roth scholarship to date-although it has been deployed in recent works by Shostak, Patrick Hayes, and Josh Lambert, amongst others. These trends are crucial to this article, as is Shostak's notion of "the gendered perspective of a consciousness shift[ing] position," a conception of the trilogy that accounts for Roth's penchant for abrupt transformation and narrative inconsistency.This article argues that the perceived faults of the Kepesh novels can mask their more subtle usefulness for Roth scholarship; in particular, by exploring the differences in the first two Kepesh novels, a sense of their significance within Roth's work can emerge. Beginning with a close reading of unfinished sequels to The Breast, this article will first track paths not taken and explore what their absence reveals about the text that would become The Professor of Desire. Branching into a discussion of the unusual publication history of The Breast, this article will then explore how Roth came to modify the text, positing that such changes evidence an uncertainty over the novel's representation of psychoanalysis in particular. Finally, this article will discuss how the techniques it has employed can provide a platform for a reexamination not only of the value of these works, but of the role of psychoanalysis in Roth's career more broadly.1. UNFINISHED SEQUELS TO THE BREASTThe Breast did not remain a static text in Roth's bibliography. Evidence from both the Philip Roth Papers and subsequent published versions of the text reveal the novella to be in a consistently uncertain position; whilst it arguably represents a definable cultural moment (the growing disenchantment with psychoanalysis amongst the American intelligentsia), it is also demonstrably a work that Roth agonized over as his career progressed. This instability deepens the sense of fundamental unease that is detectable on a contextual, theoretical, and narrative level within the novel. …

Not Getting It: The Allure of the Counterlife in Early and Late Roth

Abstract: Philip Roth, throughout his career—from “Goodbye, Columbus” (1959) to his final novel Nemesis (2010)—has been preoccupied with self-hood and identity in ways that lend themselves to analysis with fundamental psychoanalytic concepts and issues, particularly as they relate to uncontrolled impulses, unconscious drives and desires, and sublimation and repression. This essay engages with the ways in which Roth’s fiction stages the impulsive dialectics of flight and return and fantasy and sublimation in his first and final works.

Yeatsian Agony in Late Roth

Abstract: This essay explores the influence of W. B. Yeats on the later fiction of Philip Roth. Tracing Roth's engagement with Yeats from Portnoy's Complaint (1969) right up to Nemesis (2010), I argue that Roth has throughout his career been fascinated with Yeats's various aspirations to escape into aesthetic disinterest. I contend that Yeats's absorption of this struggle between life and art into a poetics of bodily agony in his later poems has a decisive influence on Roth. Yeats not only helps to shape the focus of powerful novellas such as The Dying Animal (2001) but also forms a crucial touchstone for the reckless abandon and sublime style of Roth's major novel Sabbath's Theater (1995). Roth's attentive reading of Yeats's later poems might alert us to trace wider investments in modernist epistemological tensions across Roth's fiction.

The Plot Against Philip Roth

Abstract: The PRS inbox is overflowing with queries regarding Philip Roth's premature death. While obviously discomfited by this alleged news, published in a journal we need not disclose, rest assured that our position has been, and remains, Roth won't die until we, his readers, do. Unfortunately, some of you mock what you call our naive high-mindedness. Without Roth around to crank out books every year like clockwork, the mockers assert, what the hell are we going to have to write about? Jobs are on the line here! Given such hostility, we are almost relieved that others have chosen the comfort of denial. Pointing to his recent emails to The New Yorker concerning the confidence man we just elected President, more than a few of you have dismissed the report as false. As one wag says, the story, not Roth, is DOA.Denial, however, is not a position PRS can endorse. Consequently, 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. We initially dismissed these Secret Rothians, as our editors labeled them. Since they are so obviously steeped in the kabbalah, David said, they loved conspiracies for their own sake. Exactly, Deb replied. If one didn't already exist, they'd invent it and ask how long you had been hiding it. At which point, David asked Deb how long she had been hiding this particular conspiracy and soon thereafter I was asked to provide this preamble to what we have been able to glean so far.The charge is that this report of Roth's "final hours" is the tip of the iceberg of a cover-up so vast in its scope that it has grave consequences for Roth and, perhaps more importantly, our status as Roth critics. Based in part on careful, expert readings of Roth's oeuvre, the Secret Rothians claim that none of Roth's books since Sabbath's Theater is authentic: that is, written by Roth. Relying on information not yet verified, they insist that in 1995 a gang of creative writing students, at the instigation of creative writing instructors jealous of Roth's success, killed Roth, cremated his body, hijacked his identity, and, with the aid of the notorious Jackal Wiley, proceeded to counterfeit every Roth novel since Sabbath's Theater. For fifteen years evolving teams of MFA aspirants, having enrolled in a seminar called "Learning to Write Like Philip Roth," were locked down in a fortified basement in Iowa City. Led by the Jackal and his surrogates, rotating members of the Creative Writing faculty, these sequestered "writers" were held hostage until they had produced a "Roth quality" novel, at which point they were freed from bondage, graduated, and sworn to silence on penalty of death so that what was done to them could be repeated without retaliation upon the next class. The arrangement had its perks, naturally. The Jackal secured the newly minted MFAs book contracts and provided them with advance blurbs already on file from his stable of "writers" for their own future books, not ruling out the prospect of manufacturing these projects from future classes of as yet "untrained" writers. Their supervisors kept mum about their roles in the conspiracy in exchange for tenure. We have been reliably informed that many are now much sought after as Creative Writing Gurus at Syracuse, Houston, and CalArts, among other locales, where the conspiracy had been spread.How, you ask, could this happen right under our noses? Wasn't PRS reviewing the novels as they happened? Shouldn't somebody have known? The editors of PRS acknowledge a breach in security may have occurred, but hasten to add that such a breach, if it happened, happened under previous editorial guidance. Our new policy is to bring the news to you as we receive it.Brace yourselves.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. …

"A Woman's Point of View": Dialogue and Perspective in Alex Ross Perry's Listen Up Philip

Abstract: Philip Roth's novels have a reputation for being "unfilmable."1 Only a handful of adaptations have been made from his impressive body of work, yet these have yielded mixed results and never quite seem to work as well on screen as on the written page. Perhaps the most egregious case in point is Ernest Lehman's 1972 Portnoy's Complaint, in which the book's subversive mischievousness is reduced to a series of shouting matches and missed gags. Even a relatively straight adaptation like Robert Benton's 2003 The Human Stain replaces Roth's fierce attack on political correctness with a staid melodrama. The issue, however, is not the films' fidelity to their source novels. As Robert Stam points out, the notion of literal fidelity is highly problematic. Not only does it carry moral overtones suggesting that cinema is necessarily secondary and derivative vis-a-vis literature,2 but it also assumes that the novel contains an extractable essence, "a kernel of meaning or nucleus of events that can be 'delivered' by an adaptation" ("Beyond Fidelity" 57). An adaptation, he argues, is rather like a translation, which suggests that any text can produce an infinity of different readings.3 Nonetheless, in the case of Roth adaptations, something appears to be lost in translation. Roth's books derive much of their power not from plot but from their vivid voices and their exploration of the characters' inner lives. Most of the adaptations, however, have failed to express these elements in a successful manner. As Ira Nadel puts it, "film (or individual directors) seems to be unable to shift the rhetorical resources found in Roth to the screen, making it difficult to capture the self-conscious narrative style of Roth's best writing" (53). Alex Ross Perry's Listen Up Philip, released in 2014, is not a strict adaptation of Philip Roth, yet it draws many elements from his oeuvre and weaves them into the film. In doing so, Perry opens up a dialogue with Roth, and the film works as both playful homage to and critical reconsideration of his work. This approach is in itself a tribute to Roth and the dialogical dimension of his fiction, and may best explain how the film manages to capture his writing more effectively than any other adaptation so far.Linda Hutcheon defines adaptations as "deliberate, announced, and extended revisitations of prior works" (xiv). Listen Up Philip does not acknowledge its relation to Philip Roth's novels in a legal sense. There is no "based on" or "adapted from" disclaimer. From the outset, however, many visual clues abound. The title uses the same font that is featured prominently on the cover of the first edition of Portnoy's Complaint as well as on other Roth novels of the 1970s. The title card and closing credits use a yellow color that is reminiscent of the background color of the same edition. And of course, the titular character and Roth share the same first name.More conspicuously, Perry borrows part of the plot of The Ghost Writer. The main character, Philip (played by Jason Schwartzman), is a young Jewish author on the verge of success. He is about to publish his second novel, the cryptically titled Obidant. Leaving his girlfriend Ashley Kane (Elizabeth Moss) behind in New York, he decides to accept the invitation of his literary idol, the renowned author Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce), to spend the summer at his residence upstate. There, in lieu of the elusive Amy Bellette, he finds Zimmerman's daughter Melanie (Krysten Ritter). Zimmerman is a reflection of E. I. Lonoff in The Ghost Writer but also of Zuckerman in the American trilogy and, to a certain extent, of Roth himself.4 Zimmerman's house in the woods is similar to Lonoff 's "clapboard farmhouse" (Ghost 3) and Zuckerman's "two-room cabin" (Stain 36) in the Berkshires. Like them, Zimmerman has renounced the clamor of the city: "You can't get anything done here. It has a creative energy, but not a productive energy." Zimmerman's name, echoing Zuckerman's, means "carpenter" (literally "room man") in German, which further associates him with seclusion. …

Philip Roth's Novel The Dying Animal and Isabel Coixet's Film Adaptation Elegy

Abstract: ABSTRACT:Roth's bittersweet May-December romance The Dying Animal (2000) became the basis of director Isabel Coixet's film Elegy (2008). Coixet accurately calls her film a story of \"love, loss, jealousy, and age\" (DVD commentary). But despite her able direction and excellent performances by the stars Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz, the film softens and sentimentalizes Roth's acerbic tale. In Roth's novel, \"love fractures you\" (100), but in the film, love conquers all.

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

Abstract: 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.

"about people like you": PTSD and the Ethical Relation in Roth's The Human Stain

Abstract: ABSTRACT:The Human Stain (2000) ends as it begins: with a reference to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in Les Farley’s recognition: “Never Slick Willie who gets caught” (353). Observations like this seem to reflect the novel’s interest in American politics in the 1990s; a closer reading of the final scene however suggests that the novel is as much about surviving Vietnam as it is about Bill Clinton’s White House affair. At the end of the novel’s final scene, Les says, “Your book. Send the book” (360). It is presumably the book we hold in our hands, a book not simply about Bill Clinton but about Les Farley, a book containing the story of Vietnam and the traumatic effects from which a witness cannot turn away.

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2016

Abstract: What follows is a bibliography of Philip Roth-related texts published during 2016, 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 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.

"there is some shit I will not eat": Indignation in Indignation and its Film Adaptation

Abstract: James Schamus's 2016 film adaptation of Philip Roth's 2008 novel Indignation stands out among adaptations of Roth novels in that it is actually a good film. Goodbye, Columbus, Portnoy's Complaint, American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Dying Animal, and The Humbling have all made it to the screen, and while some adaptations have been better than others, none has exactly set the world alight. Schamus's film, by contrast, received almost unanimous critical praise. The actors, led by relative newcomers Logan Lerman and Sarah Gadon, put in strong performances, the direction is assured, and the script, written by Schamus, manages to keep much of Roth's distinctive dialogue. As the previous sentence makes clear, I am no film critic. And so what follows is not a review or critique of the film, but rather a look at how the film's sense of Marcus Messner's story differs from Roth's novel, and how those differences might illuminate our understanding of both book and movie.Robert Stam, in his essay "Beyond Fidelity," argues that when we ask if a cinematic adaptation is faithful to its literary source, we fall into a black hole of further, unanswerable questions:Fidelity to what? Is the filmmaker to be faithful to the plot in its every detail? [. . .] Should one be faithful to the physical descriptions of characters? [. . .] Or is one to be faithful to the author's intentions? But what might they be, and how are they to be inferred? [. . .] Or is the adapter-filmmaker to be true to the style of a work? To its narrative point of view? Or to its artistic devices? (57-58)The problem is not just that there's no there there-that there is no single reading of the source text to be faithful to-but that it is unclear what a faithful adaptation in a different medium would look like. How can a story told with images, sound, actors, and special effects be the same as one told only with words? And if it's inevitably different, how different can it be and still be faithful?Among other possibilities, Stam suggests translation, rather than fidelity, as a more appropriate trope to describe adaptation. He writes, "the trope of adaptation as translation suggests a principled effort of intersemiotic transposition, with the inevitable losses and gains typical of any translation" (62). This strikes me as an accurate description of what most adapters are up to when they undertake what we might call a mainstream Hollywood adaptation: I'm going to do my best to translate this novel to the screen, but I understand that the final product is going to end up a different animal.But when discussing Schamus's adaptation of Roth's Indignation as a translation, it's worth keeping in mind the distinction between two kinds of translating he must undertake. The translation from one medium (a book) to another (a film) can be discussed separately from the translation from one genre (a literary novel) to another (a Hollywood movie). Not all the possibilities of books are available to every genre of book; likewise, Hollywood movies have conventions that restrict filmmakers above and beyond restrictions imposed by the medium of film.Stam calls attention to one of the essential differences between films and books as media, "the synthetic multiplicity of signifiers available to the cinema" versus the book's "single material of expression, the written word" (62, 59). The cinema has a much greater capacity for specificity, simply because the filmmaker has so many more tools at his disposal than the novelist. Early in Roth's novel, the book's protagonist, Marcus Messner, and his father argue in their family home; the only visual description in the five-page scene is a single sentence that indicates in passing that the house has a back door (9-14). The same scene in Schamus's film includes the interior of a number of rooms in a specific house (complete with furniture, window dressing, and pictures on the wall), low lighting, sound effects, and the actors Logan Lerman and Danny Burstein. …

Introduction Philip Roth’s Transdisciplinary Translation

Abstract: 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. …

The Place of the "Aesthetic" in Zuckerman Unbound: Roth's Conversation with Kierkegaard

Abstract: Philip Roth's frequent references to other writers create links that expand the themes of each novel. The intertextual relationships are part of a larger history, which begins to be a universe in itself within its own aesthetic world.One of these aesthetic worlds, which will be the focus of this article, is established through Roth's conversation with Kierkegaard in his novel Zuckerman Unbound (1981).1In his introduction to Crisis in the Life of an Actress and Other Essays on Drama Kierkegaard's translator, Stephen Crites, reminds us of the meaning of the word "aesthetic" in ancient Greek, which will also be a useful starting point for us as we go deeper into Kierkegaard's and Roth's explorations of the term. Aesthetic, "in its most comprehensive sense, is derived from the Greek verb ... which means literally 'perceive,' 'apprehend by the senses,' 'learn,' 'understand,' 'observe'" (Kierkegaard, Crisis 21). The definition guides us to see how, according to Kierkegaard, in each novel we experience what is apprehended by the senses and what is perceived most of the time by the characters so that this experience can be transferred to the readers. In addition, novels have atmosphere, musicality, and rhythm, and this is why, in Kierkegaard's reading of literature, all novels can be considered "aesthetic." The importance of such moods, perceptions, and constant observations will later explain why Kierkegaard defines some of his own writings as aesthetic- even if "aesthetic" in his world has multiple significations that are still debated among Kierkegaard scholars today.2The idea of a larger aesthetic world made by the connections between the authors and their works and the works to which they allude can be linked to what Ross Posnock calls Roth's cosmopolitanism. Posnock explains this epithet when he writes that, as the "Greek for 'world citizen' [it] is rarely a neutral term and often pejorative because it usually involves a refusal to revere local or national authority and a desire to uphold multiple affiliations" (6). In his view, Roth is better understood in an international context (3), and he points out: "The main effort of [Philip Roth's Rude Truth] is to construct these overlapping frames of reference, using them as a resource for literary criticism of the fiction, and making vivid Roth's creative engagement with a rich lineage of intellectual history" (3). Posnock argues that this cosmopolitanism evades fixed identities (4), a point with which I would agree.Taking the lead from Posnock, this essay considers the "overlapping frames of reference" in a careful reading of one connection, the conversation that Roth undertakes with Kierkegaard in Zuckerman Unbound. In so doing, it will reveal "the rich lineage of intellectual history" carried forward by Kierkegaard and continued by Roth. One of the main focuses of Kierkegaard's work is how singularity is created and how one can live with oneself by oneself.3 To achieve this purpose, according to the Danish philosopher, one has to be free of a fixed mind, a state of being that Roth seems to achieve via his very conversation with Kierkegaard.However, Roth's aesthetic bounds can also be seen in his books in terms of what Pia Masiero, in Philip Roth and the Zuckerman Books, calls a storyworld. Here she explores the possibilities of reading that Roth's novels offer to readers. Consequently, this article focuses on this storyworld and pays particular attention to the effect of reading on the reader. This ambitious and ambivalent story, which is created both by the readers and by Zuckerman, is also an aesthetic world within itself.As Masiero describes the playful relationship that Roth has with Zuckerman, "Roth projects onto his favorite alter ego the burdens and pleasure of authorship; that is, of the actual making of fictional worlds to be engaged in and apprehended by an audience" (11). Later, she explains that Zuckerman typically "mirror[s] his being-crucially-an author whose work revolves around the deft blurring of boundaries between what is imagined and what is real through a careful handling of the order and presentation of the events. …

Translating Philip Roth into Hungarian

Abstract: In this essay, the author—a translator into Hungarian of nine Philip Roth novels—covers three topic areas. In one, comprising issues of identity, culture, language and humor, she poses the question of what makes the American author's approach so familiar to her, a post-Holocaust child of a secular, assimilated Jewish family in Central Europe, someone growing up in the Hungary of Rakosi and Kadar. How does Roth's combination of being American and Jewish reflect the translator's own Hungarian variation of identity and experience? The essay also takes up the question of why the publication of some of Roth's novels was delayed in Hungary. The second part demonstrates to non-Hungarian speakers how translating English into Hungarian poses an extra challenge compared to going from English to German, French, or Italian. Relying on experience gained in her other profession—teaching English to native Hungarians—the author uses textual examples to show the structural differences between the two languages and to explain how these impact the translator's task. The third part reveals why and how Roth's prose has proven to be such a delightful challenge to translate into Hungarian. For this purpose, the paper goes through Roth's various genres of prose, and, turning to music as analogy, presents and explains their particular features and the challenge they pose.

Philip Roth through the Lens of Kepesh by Paul McDonald and Samantha Roden (review)

Abstract: Fall 2017 the context that history provides. Moreover, Derrida is not the only theorist to emphasize the ghost in his writing. Freud and Judith Butler provide accounts of the ghost that might have been useful for Coughlan’s work. Despite these minor infelicities—or perhaps because of them—Coughlan’s work is an exemplary work of critical theory that will no doubt haunt scholarship of spectrality and the ghost for years to come. By using the figure of haunting to create a genealogy of contemporary American fiction, he has suggested a new way to think about historicity and the novel, as well as about the anxiety of influence experienced by even the strongest of our writers.

Zeno 2.0: A Psychoanalytic Dialogue between Zeno's Conscience and Portnoy's Complaint

Abstract: Any reader of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (1969) who is familiar with Italo Svevo's most famous novel, Zeno's Conscience (1928), will instantly notice an uncanny resemblance between them. Yet Roth never talks about Svevo- neither in his writings, nor in interviews. In fact, the only mention of the Triestine writer is in Roth's interview with Primo Levi, where the latter comments on Svevo's mercantile background.1 A connection between Zeno and Portnoy's stories undoubtedly exists, however. David Brauner noted Roth's debt to Svevo in his essay "Getting in Your Retaliation First: Narrative Strategies in Portnoy's Complaint", in which he suggests that Portnoy's "comic neuroses" are "inherited from the protagonists of Italo Svevo and Gogol" (45) and more recently Bernard Avishai observed that "Perhaps the closest thing to Portnoy's Complaint in world literature to that time was Confessions of Zeno" (42).The aim of this essay is to show the surprising relationship between these novels by comparing the narrative incorporation of psychoanalysis in Portnoy and Zeno, and indicating similarities in their plots. In so doing, I will also reflect on the presumptive dialogue that Roth might have undertaken- might one permit enough irony to suggest: subconsciously-with Svevo. Comparing psychoanalytic readings of the novel will demonstrate why Avishai is right when he highlights the resemblance between Portnoy's Complaint and Confessions of Zeno.However, in this essay I will also demonstrate their inevitable differences- mainly the fundamental one, i.e., the form of the confession itself: one written, the other oral. Moreover, even though the two authors assume a rather comic approach to psychoanalysis, the purpose of such an approach is significantly different. The reason for that might be found in the fact that Zeno's Conscience was published nearly fifty years before Roth's novel, in different historical and cultural circumstances. Svevo's novel, although witty and ironic, is more serious than is usually acknowledged, as it transmits a rather gloomy message, likely because Zeno was written right after World War One, which was arguably even more traumatic than World War Two, mainly because of the unprecedented number of civilian victims, the scale of destruction and the use of new weapons. Hence, here psychoanalysis serves to expose the condition of humanity in a world on the verge of collapse. That is probably why Svevo does not believe in the possibility of understanding human actions, so, a priori, he considers psychoanalysis to be fraudulent. Nonetheless, a relationship between these two novels (and between the two protagonists) undoubtedly exists, even though it is of a complex nature: I dare claim that Portnoy is an "updated" Zeno.In order to understand the uniqueness of Zeno's Conscience, it is necessary to briefly introduce its background. Italo Svevo published his third novel, and the only one that gained recognition in his lifetime, La coscienza di Zeno, in 1923. (In English it was translated as Confessions of Zeno in 1930 by Beryl De Zoete, and in 2000 by William Weaver as Zeno's Conscience.2) James Joyce, Svevo's former English teacher, praised its thematic and formal treatment of time. The groundbreaking novelty of the book lies in its use of psychoanalysis.In 1931, after its publication in the United States, Burrill Freedman wrote in The Psychoanalytic Review: "Among the increasing number of literary figures to make marked use of psychoanalytical implications, one of the most important is Italo Svevo" (434).As Zeno's Conscience is a fictional autobiography written by the eponymous patient in order to enhance his psychoanalytic therapy, it is a first-person narration. Similarly to Roth, Svevo had to dismiss suggestions that Zeno was a projection of the writer himself: "It is an autobiography but not mine," protested Svevo (Opera I 779; translations from Opera Omnia are mine). This statement is echoed in Avishai's opinion about Portnoy: "a novel in the form of confession is for God's sake not a confession in the form of a novel" (10). …