More than Jewish mischief: Postmodern ethnicity in the later fiction of Philip Roth

Derek Parker Royal, Purdue University

Abstract

For most of his career, Philip Roth has attempted to blur the lines between fact and fiction and to use his own life as a literary starting point. When he published The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography in 1988, he was doing outright what many had already accused him of doing most of his career: writing about himself. This work reveals that the texts and countertexts that make up much of Roth's writing function in a symbiotic manner, and it is here—in numerous rewritings, reimaginings, and revisions of the subject—where the interplay between fiction and autobiography come into play. Roth's works highlight the construction of a Jewish American identity, and his post-Zuckerman books create texts of the self that emphasize a postmodern understanding of that ethnic subjectivity. For example, The Counterlife serves a seminal text within the body of Roth's fiction, not only because the author explores more fully the tumultuous life of his protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman, but more significantly because for the first time he contextualizes Zuckerman's personal fragmentation within a variety of Jewish melieux, including those of both the United States and Israel. Patrimony, the third in his autobiographical tetralogy, is an effort to understand the author's relationship with both his father and the American Jewish culture that his father represents, and does so within a significantly gender-based context. His most ambitious novel, Operation Shylock, is an exercise in confronting the autobiographical self by conflating the written and the unwritten worlds and problematizing any attempt to ultimately extricate one from the other. In contrast to the autobiographical narratives, Sabbath's Theater explores issues of Jewish ethnicity in a subtler manner, but attempts to understand the ethnic subject in light of the flux comprising contemporary American society. Finally, American Pastoral, much like Roth's earlier novel The Ghost Writer, foregrounds the process of postmodern ethnic subjectivity through a series of reimaginings, where the protagonists define themselves through the recreated and fictionalized lives of others. Roth's later novels reveal the life of the author within a Jewish American context, but they tell us more about the self, and the very nature of narrative, than they do their subject.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

O'Donnell, Purdue University.

Subject Area

American literature|American studies|Minority & ethnic groups|Sociology

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