Roth After Eighty: Philip Roth and the American Literary Imagination

Table of Contents:
Introduction - After Eighty: Philip Roth and the American Literary Imagination Aimee Pozorski 1 “Every third thought shall be my grave”: Roth, Memento Mori, and Story Debra Shostak 2 Roth @ 25: Publishing Goodbye, Columbus Ira Nadel 3 “A Human Being Lives Here”: Philip Roth on Scandals and the American Presidency Claudia Brühwiler 4 “With an accomplice no less brilliant than Jean Genet”: A Comparative Approach to Roth’s Autofiction Patrick Hayes 5 Performance Anxiety: Impotence, Queerness, and the “Drama of Self-Disgust” in Philip Roth’s The Professor of Desire and The Humbling David Brauner 6 Stalkers, Furies, and Comforters: Roth’s Grave Comedy of Persecution Aurélie Guillain 7 “I told my wrath, my Roth did grow”: Anger in Operation Shylock Alex Calder 8 “My Kinsmen, My Precursors”: Philip Roth, Epic, Influence, and Bardic Proclivities Catherine Morley 9 “I was the prosthesis”: Roth and Late Style Adam Zachary Newton 10 Performance, Affective Adaptation, Memory, Pretend Play, and Suicide in Philip Roth's The Humbling Amy Gelbart 11 Newark: The Shtetl Mark Shechner Afterword - Mark Shechner’s Legacy David Gooblar

About the Author :
David Gooblar is a lecturer in the Rhetoric Department at the University of Iowa. Aimee Pozorski is professor of English and director of English Graduate Studies at Central Connecticut State University.

Review :
This collection of new essays is a most fitting tribute to the 'end' of Philip Roth’s long and prolific career. The rich and varied approaches to Roth’s fiction contained in these pages reflect the enduring influence of one of the major voices of late twentieth-early twenty first century American life and thought. The essays artfully arranged in this volume seamlessly and gracefully paint a portrait of this ingeniously complex writer of our time. Gooblar and Pozorski are among the most dedicated Roth scholars around right now, and they have put together a lively collection of frequently original essays, all of which demonstrate intimate understanding of Roth's body of work. Individually, the essays place specific novels and even whole phases of Roth's writing in a richly intellectual and critical context, and as a whole, the collection demonstrates how the greatest living American novelist can continue to inspire new and inventive readings from a worthy cohort of dedicated critics. Roth after Eighty is an excellent contribution to Roth scholarship. In essays by a distinguished roster of Roth scholars, it explores new aspects of Roth's American literary imagination, while weaving in a healthy dose of comparative literature. Its purview is at once refreshingly local and robustly cosmopolitan.