Playful and Serious Philip Roth as a Comic Writer

by Siegel, Ben; Halio, Jay L.

• ISBN13: 9781611491470
• ISBN10: 1611491479
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-12-01
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press

Summary

Few contemporary American writers have stirred the minds and emotions of their readers as Philip Roth has done. Even fewer writers have excelled in various forms of the comic as Roth has for over a half-century. Playful and Serious assembles a group of outstanding Roth scholars and critics who focus their attention on the different ways Roth brings his comic tendencies to bear on essentially serious topics. The term 'comic' is used in the broadest sense to include humor, irony, satire, comedy, black comedy, and their variations. As co-editor Ben Siegel points out, Roth's special humor often appears to grow 'more surrealistic and obsessive, as in each new fiction he tries not merely to surpass the daily news but to touch what is deeply private and dark in the modern psyche.' In the process, he targets 'his society's most deeply embedded pieties and hypocrisies, enthusiasms, and lunacies.' This collection takes account of the majority of Roth's works, beginning with some of his earliest stories and ending with several of his most recent novels. It also includes an account of several relatively neglected works, such as 'Novotny's Pain' and 'On the Air,' but the essays in this volume deal mainly with the major works of fiction.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. 7
Introduction	p. 11
A Comic Crisis of Faith: Philip Roth's "Conversion of the Jews" and "Eli, the Fanatic"	p. 25
Philip Roth's Comic Realism in Goodbye, Columbus	p. 35
Masturbation and Its Discontents; or, Serious Relief: Freudian Comedy in Portnoy's Complaint	p. 47
Affairs of the Breast: Philip Roth and David Kepesh	p. 68
The Body in Shame: Philip Roth's Physical Comedy	p. 92
Plots against America: Language and the Comedy of Conspiracy in Philip Roth's Early Fiction	p. 117
The Myths of Summer: Philip Roth's The Great American Novel	p. 133
Operation Shylock: The Double, the Comic, and the Quest for Identity	p. 152
Roth's Falstaff: Transgressive Humor in Sabbath's Theater	p. 181
Sabbath's Complaint: Philip Roth's Black Comedy in Sabbath's Theater	p. 195
Deadly Farce in the Comedy of Philip Roth	p. 208
The Human Stain: A Satiric Tragedy of the Politically Incorrect	p. 222
"To Endure and Go On": Comedy, Castration, and Phallus in Philip Roth's Exit Ghost	p. 229
Indignation: The Opiates of the Occident	p. 255
Notes on Contributors	p. 269
Index	p. 272
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