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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... tells us something new—that the postmodernist commitment, at least in its more programmatic versions, has proved “old-fashioned,” while the modernist continually renews itself, responding to the zeitgeist while also excavating the space ...
... tell us in his memoir The Facts that The Portrait of a Lady “had been a virtual handbook during the early drafts of Letting Go,” his first novel (157). Far from concealing this inspiration, Roth builds it into the plot: his Jewish ...
... telling us for centuries . To grasp our inherent theatricality is valuable to the extent that it sparks critical scrutiny of the inveterate American reflex to look through artifice to the ( alleged ) real , as if the two are neatly ...
... telling his readers before they form their own opinions or hear it from the critics that he (or Zuckerman or Tarnopol or Kepesh) is, among other things, overly clever, self-absorbed, emotionally vacant, compulsively manipulative, and ...
... tells his harrowing tale of survival, Kepesh asks him what he wanted to be before the war started: Probably because of the strength of his arms and the size of his hands I expect to hear him say a carpenter or mason. In America he drove ...
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 |