Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of ImmaturityPrinceton University Press, 2008 M07 28 - 328 pages 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. |
From inside the book
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... fiction, integrates them directly into his characterizations, a method made plausible by the fact that nearly all his protagonists and narrators are writers or figures of highly developed sensibility for whom literature is the stuff of ...
... fiction by John Barth , Donald Barthelme , William Bur- roughs , William Gaddis , William Gass , John Hawkes , Ishmael Reed , Su- san Sontag , among others — that was required reading for the intellec- tually and politically adventurous ...
... fiction in the post - modernist era of John Barth and Thomas Pynchon ” and attached ten questions . Among them : " why do you continue to write ? ... Do you consider yourself part of a rear- guard action , in the service of a declining ...
... fiction and five of nonfiction—has left such early and parochial rubrics in the dustbin of literary history. And he has gone far from home (if only to return in The Plot Against America, which seven-year-old Philip Roth narrates). For ...
... fictional characters (Lambert Strether, for example), as part of his strategic resistance to the rigidity of bourgeois character structure, its anal deformations, as Theodor Adorno called them.5 James shares this assault on propriety ...
Contents
1 | |
9780691138435_3CH2 | 39 |
9780691138435_4CH3 | 88 |
9780691138435_5CH4 | 125 |
9780691138435_6CH5 | 155 |
9780691138435_7CH6 | 193 |
9780691138435_8CH7 | 236 |
9780691138435_9COD | 260 |
9780691138435_10NOT | 267 |
9780691138435_11BIB | 287 |
9780691138435_12IND | 295 |