Recent papers in Philip Roth

American Pastoral is not only an elegiac fictional biography, but an in-depth analysis of the demise of the American dream in the context of postwar social and cultural mutations. The loss of innocence echoes the tragic mythical Fall from.. more

American Pastoral is not only an elegiac fictional biography, but an in-depth analysis of the demise of the American dream in the context of postwar social and cultural mutations. The loss of innocence echoes the tragic mythical Fall from Paradise and the novel's main characters, Seymour 'Swede' Levov and his daughter, Merry, mirror this process in a complex and meaningful way.

in 'doppiozero', 2 settembre 2019
https://www.doppiozero.com/materiali/philip-roth-eccola-la-vita-umana

La revue Implications Philosophiques lance un appel à contributions autour de l’œuvre de Philip Roth. Le dossier entend réunir des textes variés : analyses conceptuelles et littéraires ; récits d’expériences de lecture et études.. more

La revue Implications Philosophiques lance un appel à contributions autour de l’œuvre de Philip Roth. Le dossier entend réunir des textes variés : analyses conceptuelles et littéraires ; récits d’expériences de lecture et études thématiques de portée philosophique. Il s'articulera principalement autour des rapports entre vérité, identité et réel, mais est susceptible d'accueillir des problématiques différentes.
https://www.fabula.org/actualites/appel-contributions-de-la-revue-implications-philosophiques-pour-un-dossier-autour-de-philip-roth_92328.php
http://www.implications-philosophiques.org/varia/appels-a-contribution/aac-philip-roth/
https://calenda.org/665389
Pour toute précision me contacter à l'adresse : margauxme@gmail.com

Philip Roth having Jewish ethnicity is a distinguished and famous writer in American literature. In his first novella Goodbye, Colombus, containing five other short stories, there are numbers of Jewish characters from all classes. This.. more

Philip Roth having Jewish ethnicity is a distinguished and famous writer in American literature. In his first novella Goodbye, Colombus, containing five other short stories, there are numbers of Jewish characters from all classes. This diversity enables the author make a good humor and flippancy in the lower and upper classes or between each other. Neil Klugman who is both narrator and protagonist of the novella living in working class neighborhood falls in love with Brenda Patimkin, a college student from a wealthy family. Roth from Klugman’s point of view satirizes and humors Jews and their relationships between themselves and Gentiles. The author manages to lampoon his society and himself as a Jew of New Jersey. In this study, Roth’s first novella written in 1959, Goodbye, Colombus will be argued in terms of satirical and humoristic characteristics.

In a 1984 interview with longtime friend Edna O’Brien, Philip Roth describes her writing as “a piece of fine meshwork, a net of perfectly observed sensuous details that enables you to contain all the longing and pain and remorse that.. more

In a 1984 interview with longtime friend Edna O’Brien, Philip Roth describes her writing as “a piece of fine meshwork, a net of perfectly observed sensuous details that enables you to contain all the longing and pain and remorse that surge through the fiction.” The phrase “fine meshwork” can apply not only to O’Brien’s writing, but also to the connective threads that bind her work to others’, including, most illuminatingly, Roth’s.
Since the publication of their first controversial novels in the 1950s and 1960s, Roth and O’Brien have always argued against the isolation of mind from body, autobiography from fiction, life from art, and self from nation. In Fine Meshwork, Dan O’Brien investigates the shared concerns of these two authors, now regarded as literary icons in their home countries and around the world. He traces their fifty-year literary friendship and the striking parallels in their books and reception, bringing together what, at first glance, seem to be quite disparate milieus: the largely feminist and Irish scholarship on O’Brien with Jewish and American perspectives on Roth. In doing so, and in considering them in a transnational context, he argues that the intertwined nature of their writing symbolizes the far-ranging symbiosis between Irish literature and its American—particularly Jewish-American—counterpart.

Philip Roth‘s The Human Stain (2000) simply tells the story of a New England classics professor, Coleman Silk, who is forced to quit his job for alleged racism. The charge is a lie, but the truth about Silk is more shocking because it.. more

Philip Roth‘s The Human Stain (2000) simply tells the story of a New England classics professor, Coleman Silk, who is forced to quit his job for alleged racism. The charge is a lie, but the truth about Silk is more
shocking because it turns out that for his entire adult life, Silk has been covering up the fact that he is neither Jewish nor white although he is actually a very light-skinned man. The stain given in the title of this novel stands for both a mark on the skin and the mark of our experienced based stories, and which, consequently construct our identities. This paper, therefore, analyzes how the idea of 'stain‘ is ironically inscribed both socially and individually into our identities.

Programme CPGE scientifiques
20 dissertations corrigées

How contemporary USA novel represents Life as a fiction. How Philip Roth e Don DeLillo represent in their novels artists, bodies, voices and time.

Regarded as a pivotal figure of contemporary American literature, Philip Roth was vastly appreciated also abroad, as his works were translated into different languages and influenced writers all around the world. This paper aims to.. more

Regarded as a pivotal figure of contemporary American literature, Philip Roth was vastly appreciated also abroad, as his works were translated into different languages and influenced writers all around the world. This paper aims to analyze the reception of Roth’s novels in Italy, where they caused a variety of reactions during the long career of the writer. In order to keep into consideration both the response of the public and that of the critics, I will examine an array of materials ranging from the Italian editions of the works and the data about their diffusion, to reviews and articles on newspapers and magazines. The choice of Italy as a case study will allow for an in-depth analysis of the specific traits of Roth’s reception in a non-English speaking country, as well as for a comparison with his success and the controversies he faced in the US.
Roth’s first books received significant critical attention but, despite the immediate translations, they went almost unnoticed in Italy. It was Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) that made the writer known to the Italian public. The huge commercial success of the novel was due to many reasons: the echo of the American controversies around the book, the advertising campaign that preceded the first Italian edition (1970), the journalistic debates after the publication, involving many intellectuals. The following phase of the writer’s career was deeply influenced by the popularity of Portnoy, as his new novels were constantly compared to the best-seller book and not considered as individual works. During the Seventies and the Eighties, Roth obtained limited success in Italy, even if all his books were translated; only a few scholars, like Fernanda Pivano, kept alive the attention around him. After the publication of American Pastoral (1997), the presence of the American author in Italy became noteworthy: starting from the early 2000s, his books were massively reprinted, reviewed, and studied. The interest towards Roth was determined both by the importance of his works and by the activity literary critics and journalists like Antonio D’Orrico, who created a ‘cult’ around the author that he defined, for years, as “the greatest living writer” in his articles for the Corriere della Sera.

A un anno dalla morte di Philip Roth, una riflessione sulla sua eredità e sulla trasmissibilità del desiderio, inteso come una funzione soggettiva e personale del nostro contatto con la realtà, quella fatta di passioni, malattie e lutti,.. more

A un anno dalla morte di Philip Roth, una riflessione sulla sua eredità e sulla trasmissibilità del desiderio, inteso come una funzione
soggettiva e personale del nostro contatto con la realtà, quella fatta di passioni, malattie e lutti, ambizioni smodate, spesso sconfitte. L’opera di Roth sta in questa piega umbratile, ondeggiante, tra la deflagrazione del desiderio e la sua deflazione.

Il discorso verte sull'utilità di considerare le rappresentazioni della paternità sempre nel quadro teorico costituito dal concetto freudiano di complesso edipico. Il testo fa riferimento agli studi di Orlando secondo cui il tema del.. more

Il discorso verte sull'utilità di considerare le rappresentazioni della paternità sempre nel quadro teorico costituito dal concetto freudiano di complesso edipico. Il testo fa riferimento agli studi di Orlando secondo cui il tema del marito tradito si sviluppa in Europa dopo l'avvento del cristianesimo e può essere inteso come un ritorno del represso rispetto ad una religione in cui il padre pretende che il figlio si sacrifichi per lui. Infatti dietro l'immagine del marito tradito (solitamente vecchio e stupido) sta l'immagine del padre, e dietro l'immagine del giovane e intraprendente amante sta la figura del figlio. Si tratta dunque di una rivincita che però avviene in modo trasposto, indiretto. Ma, nota sempre Orlando, da una certa data in poi il marito-padre tradito diviene una figura degna di identificazione e commiserazione. Nel discorso qui riportato si afferma che la logica sempre più convulsa di superamento del passato e cioè del vecchio e cioè del padre ha creato le premesse per una visione della paternità più preoccupata e partecipe. E questo lo si vede bene sia in Giuseppe Verdi che ben più in là nel tempo in 'Pastorale americana'.

Philip Roth has been praised for the way in which he represents human experience in depth. The thesis I would like to propose is about the stain that his characters bear, for it appears as a sign that tells them that it is a fantasy to.. more

Philip Roth has been praised for the way in which he represents human experience in depth. The thesis I would like to propose is about the stain that his characters bear, for it appears as a sign that tells them that it is a fantasy to try to be pure. Thus, the stain is the most powerful and pervasive physical reality, and it characterises Roth’s realism. It is mostly the representation of an experience, so a study of the human stain, rather than analyzing it as a concept, must embrace it as the literary rendering of a human phenomenon. Its obscure nature has both positive and negative connotations, escaping an easy definition, but the literary device that Roth uses can be studied in order to throw a new light on the central issues in his work.
When analyzing the novels under consideration, I have chosen a comparative approach, structuring the thesis in three chapters, each dealing with an aspect of the representation of the human stain. Likewise, each chapter consists of various sections: Firstly, the issue of the impossibility of purity is explored, with a focus on the images of the stain as an incurable physical blemish which is connected to a larger meaning of an inescapable moral problem. The second chapter deals with the question of moral transgression by examining the ambiguousness of the stain regarding desire and sexuality, while the third chapter attempts to explain how the stain embodies pain and the struggle between eros and thanatos.
Some scholars, such as David Brauner, have shown interest in the metaphorical meanings of the human stain, but even though there are excellent and comprehensive studies that overview the issues of moral transgression and impurity in Roth’s work, like Debra Shostak’s, for example, there are no studies that focus solely on the stain as a device that is used in several novels and has a complex meaning.
I find the representation of the stain to be more visible in the following novels by Roth: Sabbath's Theater (1995), American Pastoral (1997), The Human Stain (2000) and The Dying Animal (2001), with the starting point at his early short story titled “Epstein” (Goodbye, Columbus and other stories, 1959). So all of these form the corpus under consideration in this study.
So far, this study has shown that the literary device of the human stain is not just a recurrent symbol, but that in Roth’s work, it functions as a network of images, symptoms and consequences that represent the complex reality of human impurity. It is not just an echo of Hawthorne’s mark of sin, for the irony with which it is described allows for a constant questioning of moral standards, as in Nabokov’s Lolita, for example. The human stain proves to be a lens through which the reader can perceive the conflicts that characterise Roth’s fiction.

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