This essay looks at James Schamus's 2016 film Indignation alongside its source material, Philip Roth's 2008 novel of the same name. Among the biggest differences between the two texts is that the ...film simplifies Roth's plot and flattens the character of Marcus Messner. But by moving beyond Marcus's point of view, Schamus's film casts a new light on Roth's novel and the emotion evoked by its title.
Julian Barnes is one of the most refined British writers and distinguished intellectuals of his generation whose rich body of work has been awarded many literary prizes both in the UK and abroad. ...Although primarily a novelist and essayist, the chameleon of British letters has also written short stories, television scripts and a screenplay. This critical guide provides a wide range of current critical perspectives on Barnes work from early bestselling novels Flauberts Parrot and The History of the World in 10 Chapters up to Arthur and George. Including contributions by some of the finest critics working in the contemporary field, it reflects the richness and diversity of one of Britains greatest living writers.
...as I wrote my study, Roth kept writing, too. Roth had been including the word fuck in his novels since 1962's Letting Go, and the second excerpt of Portnoy's Complaint memorably began with an ...explicit description of masturbation ("Then came the years when half my waking life was spent locked behind the bathroom door, firing my wad down the toilet"), but the directness here, the seriousness with which the book's opening takes transgression, signals a different kind of book than Roth had been writing ("Whacking Off" 385). ...while there are superficial similarities between Sabbath and earlier Roth alter egos (he was born during the Depression, pursues an artistic vocation, has an intense connection to his mother, thinks about sexual desire constantly), the way we follow Sabbath, from his affair with Drenka Balich, to his torpedoing of his marriage, to his return to the streets of New York, and then eventually to the Jersey shore of his childhood, I find dizzying, disorienting, more difficult to digest than Roth's other books. Discussing his writing process for the outrageous and often baffling The Great American Novel, Roth described his forays into absurd fantasy as flouting his internal critic and judge: "When the censor in me rose responsibly in his robes to say, 'Now look here, don't you think that's just a little too—' I would reply, from beneath the baseball cap I often wore when writing that book, 'Precisely why it stays!
Philip Roth scholars continue to reflect on what Philip Roth’s retirement in 2012 means for the landscape of American literature and what his professed disappearance from the public eye in 2014 would ...mean for the future consideration of his legacy. This collection seeks to answer those questions in a scholarly way. Composed of eleven original essays written by accomplished scholars in the field of Philip Roth Studies, the collection is both relevant and engaging on three levels: it is the first of its kind to offer a scholarly retrospective of Roth’s works and career; it considers Roth within the American literary imagination; and it speculates on Roth’s legacy—particularly the enduring quality of his novels that will continue to resonate long after his retirement.
This essay traces the connections between Tobias Wolff's life writing, his fiction, and the life writing of Wolff's brother, Geoffrey Wolff. It examines the links within Wolff's writing and life and ...between the characteristics of the American boys' prep school environment and a tendency to lie about the self, and it argues that Wolff conceives of fiction paradoxically as both refuge from and extension of those instincts of deceitful self-projection.
Introduction: Roth and Women Gooblar, David
Philip Roth studies,
04/2012, Letnik:
8, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This introduction provides an overview of the critical treatment of the “problem” of women in Philip Roth's writing over the years, with particular emphasis on the accusations of misogyny that have ...dogged Roth almost throughout his career. The piece, while highlighting some of the more interesting and valuable critical threads, decries the generally shallow consideration critics have given the subject. This issue is a modest attempt to begin to counter that shortcoming.
WINNER of the Association of Jewish Libraries' Judaica Reference AwardProvides critical overviews of the main writers and key themes of Anglophone Jewish fiction
This collection of essays represents ...a new departure for, and a potentially (re)defining moment in, literary Jewish Studies. It is the first volume to bring together 28 chapters covering a wide range of American, British, South African, Canadian and Australian Jewish fiction.
The volume is divided into 3 parts - American Jewish Fiction; British Jewish Fiction; and International and Transnational Anglophone Jewish Fiction - but many of the essays cross over these boundaries and speak to each other implicitly, as well as, on occasion, explicitly. Extending and redefining the canon of modern Jewish fiction, the volume juxtaposes major authors with more marginal figures, revising and recuperating individual reputations, rediscovering forgotten and discovering new work, and in the process remapping the whole terrain. This volume opens windows onto vistas that previously had been obscured and opens doors for the next generation of studies that could not proceed without a wide-ranging, visionary empiricism grounding their work.
Key FeaturesHighlights the rich diversity of the field and identifies its key themes, including immigration, the Diaspora, the Holocaust, Judaism, assimilation, antisemitism and ZionismAnalyses the main trends in Anglophone Jewish fiction and situates them in historical contextDiscusses the place of Anglophone Jewish fiction in relation to critical debates concerning transatlanticism and transnationalism; ethnicity and identity politics; postcolonial studies, feminist studies and Jewish StudiesWith a preface by Mark Shechner, the volume's contributors include Vicki Aarons (Trinity University, Texas), Debra Shostak (Wooster College, Ohio), Ira Nadel (University of British Columbia), Efraim Sicher (Ben-Gurion University), Phyllis Lassner (Northwestern University), Sue Vice (University of Sheffield), Lori Harrison-Kahan (Boston College), Ruth Gilbert (University of Winchester), Beate Neumeier (University of Cologne) and Sandra Singer (University of Guelph)
ARE YOU KIDDING ME? David Gooblar
The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction,
06/2015
Book Chapter
‘It’ is called “black humor” and I think I would have more luck defining an elbow or a corned-beef sandwich’ (Friedman 1965: vii). So Bruce Jay Friedman begins his foreword to the 1965 anthology he ...edited for Bantam Books, entitledBlack Humor. Indeed, Friedman does not try to define the concept so much as sketch the cultural conditions that allowed black humour – whatever it is – to emerge as one of the most discussed literary modes of mid-1960s American letters. ‘The source and fountain and bible of black humor’, according to Friedman, isThe New York Times, whose headlines
