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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... figure who explicitly emerges , relatively irony free , in his two family memoirs . Of course , Emerson is no Whitman , Roth is no Céline or even Hu- bert Selby or Kathy Acker . But these limits are precisely what make im- maturity ...
... figures of highly developed sensibility for whom literature is the stuff of life.2 In short, as if behind the backs of the pigeonholing critics who would anchor him to his historical coordinates, Roth resides in a “world literary space ...
... figures whom I set in conversation with a novelist whose cosmopolitanism has for too long been hidden under the familiar rubric of Jewish American. Early on, conventional wisdom cast Roth in “the role of the rebellious Jewish son” and ...
... figures such as Faulkner and Hemingway or his original cohort of Bellow, Mailer, Malamud. Critics generally agree that the later work of all these writers marks a falling off from their prime. But the preponderance of major novels in ...
... figures here , for without using the word ap- propriation he makes vivid the spirit of its practice when he says " to be an American is a great preparation for culture ... we can deal freely with forms of civilization not our own , can ...
Contents
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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 |