Posnock Philip Roth's Rude Truth

The Art of Immaturity
Course Book
ISBN: 978-1-4008-2734-3
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 328 Seiten

Has anyone ever worked harder and longer at being immature than Philip Roth? The novelist himself pointed out the paradox, saying that after establishing a reputation for maturity with two earnest novels, he "worked hard and long and diligently" to be frivolous--an effort that resulted in the notoriously immature Portnoy's Complaint (1969). Three-and-a-half decades and more than twenty books later, Roth is still at his serious "pursuit of the unserious." But his art of immaturity has itself matured, developing surprising links with two traditions of immaturity--an American one that includes Emerson, Melville, and Henry James, and a late twentieth-century Eastern European one that developed in reaction to totalitarianism. In Philip Roth's Rude Truth--one of the first major studies of Roth's career as a whole--Ross Posnock examines Roth's "mature immaturity" in all its depth and richness.

Philip Roth's Rude Truth will force readers to reconsider the narrow categories into which Roth has often been slotted--laureate of Newark, New Jersey; junior partner in the firm Salinger, Bellow, Mailer, and Malamud; Jewish-American regionalist. In dramatic contrast to these caricatures, the Roth who emerges from Posnock's readable and intellectually vibrant study is a great cosmopolitan in the tradition of Henry James and Milan Kundera.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Posnock, Ross

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface xi

Acknowledgments xix

List of Abbreviations xxi

Chapter 1: Introduction: Roth Antagonistes 1

Chapter 2: Immaturity: A Genealogy 39

Chapter 3: Ancestors and Relatives: The Game of Appropriation and the Sacrifice of Assimilation 88

Chapter 4: "A very slippery subject": The Counterlife as Pivot 125

Chapter 5: Letting Go, or How to Lead a Stupid Life: Sabbath's Nakedness 155

Chapter 6: Being Game in The Human Stain 193

Chapter 7: The Two Philips 236

Coda: "The stars are indispensable" 260

Notes 267

Works Cited 287

Index 295

Über Autor(innen)

Ross Posnock is Professor of English at Columbia University, where he also teaches American Studies. His books include The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity; Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual; and The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison.