Overview
I
think of my life as one long speech that I’ve been listening to . .
.
how to think, how not to think; how to behave, how not to behave; . . . the book of my life is a book of
voices,” reflects Nathan Zuckerman, Philip Roth’s alter ego, in I Married a
Communist. Looking at Roth’s writing life as a “book of voices,” Debra Shostak
listens in on the conversations that this prominent American novelist has
conducted with himself and his times over forty years and twenty-four books. She
finds that while Roth frequently shifts perspectives, he repeatedly returns to
interrelated questions of cultural history, literary history, and, especially,
selfhood. Arguing that Roth’s method of composition, like his conception of
self, is fundamentally dialogical, Shostak follows the writer from his
depictions of embodied, ethnically determined selves to his exploration of
indeterminate selves revealed in the public spaces of confession and historical
trauma.
Shostak demonstrates that for Roth no perspective gains ascendancy
over another, nor does he work the various viewpoints toward a synthesis.
Instead, his countertexts simply “talk” to one another. For this reason Shostak
does not treat Roth’s canon chronologically but pursues a complex thematic
investigation of the concerns that preoccupy Roth: masculinity, embodiment, male
sexuality, Jewish American identity, the pressures of recent American history on
the self, and storytelling as an act of both fictive imagination and
quasi-autobiographical disclosure. She arranges the study to enable the reader
to understand how the individual fictions and memoirs intersect and cohere and
where they depart from and disrupt one another.
In addition to offering fresh, informed readings of Roth’s work,
Shostak provides new insights from the virtually untapped archives of the Philip
Roth Collection at the Library of Congress.
Author bio:
DEBRA SHOSTAK is a professor of English at the College of Wooster,
where she teaches American literature and film. Her essays have appeared in
Contemporary Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Twentieth Century Literature,
Critique, Shofar, and Arizona Quarterly, as well as in several edited
collections. Shostak lives in Wooster,
Ohio.
Synopsis
Shostak (American literature and film, College of Wooster) argues that contemporary American writer Roth does not privilege any perspective over another or work various viewpoints toward a synthesis, rather his countertexts simply talk to one another. She considers Roth and counter-Roth anatomies of desire, the member of the tribe, impersonation and the diaspora Jew, fictions of self-exposure, inventing the real, and subject in and into history. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR