Playful and Serious: Philip Roth As a Comic Writer
"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,...
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"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. They clearly show how Roth's interest in comedy has evolved from the outrageous but nonetheless hilarious comedy of Portnoy's Complaint to the more profoundly comic aspects of The Human Stain and subsequent novels. While death has increasingly become a preoccupation of those latest novels, Roth has not lost his ability to show how tragedy and comedy interact in, for example, Indignation.
Introduction Ben Siegel Siegel, Ben Jay L. Halio Halio, Jay L. 11A Comic Crisis of Faith: Philip Roth's "Conversion of the Jews" and "Eli, the Fanatic" Timothy Parrish Parrish, Timothy 25Philip Roth's Comic Realism in Goodbye, Columbus Victoria Aarons Aarons, Victoria 35Masturbation and Its Discontents; or, Serious Relief: Freudian Comedy in Portnoy's Complaint David Brauner Brauner, David 47Affairs of the Breast: Philip Roth and David Kepesh Judith Yaross Lee Lee, Judith Yaross 68The Body in Shame: Philip Roth's Physical Comedy David Gilotta Gilotta, David 92Plots against America: Language and the Comedy of Conspiracy in Philip Roth's Early Fiction Derek Parker Royal Royal, Derek Parker 117The Myths of Summer: Philip Roth's The Great American Novel Ben Siegel Siegel, Ben 133Operation Shylock: The Double, the Comic, and the Quest for Identity Elaine Safer Safer, Elaine 152Roth's Falstaff: Transgressive Humor in Sabbath's Theater Peter Scheckner Scheckner, Peter 181Sabbath's Complaint: Philip Roth's Black Comedy in Sabbath's Theater Gurumurthy Neelakantan Neelakantan, Gurumurthy 195Deadly Farce in the Comedy of Philip Roth Jay L. Halio Halio, Jay L. 208The Human Stain: A Satiric Tragedy of the Politically Incorrect Sam Bluefarb Bluefarb, Sam 222"To Endure and Go On": Comedy, Castration, and Phallus in Philip Roth's Exit Ghost James Mellard Mellard, James 229Indignation: The Opiates of the Occident Alan Cooper Cooper, Alan 255Notes on Contributors 269Index 272
