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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... never clear where he thought he belonged or to what he owed alle- giance” (Wisse 318). This response, with its trace of exasperation at Roth's elusiveness, is a perennial one to the cosmopolitan evasion of fixed identity.2 Roth is ...
... never reasons , never proves , it simply perceives ; it is vision . . . . The thoughts of youth & ' first thoughts ' are the revelations of Reason " ( Letters 133 ) . And poetry is one of the things that resides in the province of ...
... never reasons ” and maturity is never mature : in this book , maturity suffers a reversal analogous to Cartesian rationalism when exposed to Emersonian reason . The premise of Kant's notion of En- lightenment , maturity , is emptied of ...
... never accepted the alternatives of remaining childlike or growing up; he wanted neither to put up with infantilism nor to pay the cost of a rigid defense against regression, even were it to be 'in the ser- vice of the I.' In him there ...
... never murdered anyone , who do our homework every night ? ' . . . Dear Vladimir Nabokov — ' The girls in our school ... and so on . " Most readers and writers are drawn to literature , Roth remarked in the early 1960s , to discover ...
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 |