To what extent can the leaky, porous bodies in Philip Roth's fiction
be read as symbols of resistance against anti-Semitism, white
supremacy, and racism? Philip Roth and the Body questions the symbolic
functionality of the corporeal in Roth's main works of fiction,
particularly as sites of gender and racial identification for Roth's
protagonists. In his recurrent employment of the abject, Roth throws
into doubt the body as a coherent, stable entity, undermining his male
characters' determinations of gendered and racial otherness through
his porously unstable bodies. Joshua Lander draws on the work of
Zygmunt Bauman and his theory of the 'conceptual Jew' to argue that
Roth's fiction is yoked together by a shared interest in how
anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jewish difference – centered around the
body – pervasively inform American Jewish identities. The book also
contends that Roth resists American white nationalism by transforming
the body's ejaculations, excretions, secretions, and expulsions into
symbols of difference that he repeatedly ties to Jewishness. At the
same time, this study highlights how Roth's novels, through his focus
on Jewish men, risk the reification of America's sexist social
structures as they intersect with the very racism Roth seeks to
undermine. Philip Roth and the Body's examination of how bodies in
Roth's fiction are entities troubled within his prose renews
conversations about whose bodies matter, both in Roth studies and in
the context of America's racial and social politics.
Les mer
Jewishness, Gender, and Race
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9798765104866
Publisert
2024
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Bloomsbury USA
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter