• 영어영문학
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• 제58권5호
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• pp.809-837
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• 2012

Philip Roth rejects the narrative unity and singularity of the traditional novel and creates instead a multi-levelled, fragmentary, and repetitive narrative. It is not easy to distinguish fact from fiction in The Plot Against America. As an entertaining and creative work of the postmodern historiographic metafiction, Philip Roth's The Plot Against America interrogates the existence of historically verifiable facts, the validity of authentic and official version of history, and reexamines the narrative conventions of history writing. The aim of this paper is to examine Roth's narrative experiment or 'thought experiment' and to explore the intention of creating alternative history in The Plot Against America. Roth does a 'thought experiment' in The Plot Against America. In this cautionary "what if" political fable, Roth hypothesizes that in 1940 aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, an ardent isolationist who was sympathetic to Hiltler, won the presidency. Jewish communities are stunned and terrified as America flirts with fascism and anti-semitism. Reimagining his children-with considerable fact mixed in with the fiction-Roth narrates an alternative history that has an unsettling plausibility. Roth has constructed a brilliantly telling and disturbing historical prism by which to refract the American psyche as it pertain to the discord of individual, race, history in The Plot Against America. Roth analyzes the life of individual in a historic space, the situation of anti-semitism in world of invisible order, racial conflict between black and white in world of visible order, and the darkest side of national power in this work. Roth's stories argue for the equality of various cultures grounded on the common notion of humanity, for an ethic of mutual respect, and for the peaceful resolution of conflicts.

• 영어영문학
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• 제64권2호
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• pp.151-170
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• 2018

This paper examines the relationship and ideas of Hannah Arendt and Philip Roth including how they met, their correspondence and intellectual parallels, particularly in their shared criticism of Jewish ideals and culture in Europe and North America. It analyzes similarities in their careers and texts, especially between Eichmann in Jerusalem and Operation Shylock, as well as The Ghost Writer, while measuring their reception as social commentators and writers. Kafka was an important figure for both writers, Arendt's earliest writing engaged with the significance of Kafka in understanding and criticizing twentieth century political and cultural values in Europe. For Roth, Kafka offered a similar critique of moral principles he found corroded in North American Jewish life. Arendt connected with other writers, notably Isak Dinesen, W. H. Auden, Randall Jarrell and William Styron who further linked the two: he knew both Arendt and Roth and cited, incorrectly, a work by Arendt as the source for the key incident in his 1979 novel Sophie's Choice. He claimed it was Eichmann in Jerusalem; it was Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt's reaction to Roth's fiction, however, remains a mystery: she died in 1975, before Roth began to seriously and consistently engage with Holocaust issues in works like The Ghost Writer (1979) and Operation Shylock (1993). Yet even in death they are joined. Their graves are only steps apart at the Bard College Cemetery in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

• 영미문화
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• 제10권2호
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• pp.49-72
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• 2010

As the first of Philip Roth's recent series of novels that delve into American Cold War history deeply entwined with the post-war Jewish American experience, American Pastoral traces the tragic fall of a third-generation Jewish American named Seymour "Swede" Levov, whose dream of complete assimilation to the post-ethnic American paradise is irrecoverably disrupted when his young daughter blows up the local post office to protest against the Vietnam War. This essay proposes to examine Swede Levov's interrupted pursuit of the American dream by locating it within specific Cold War contexts and national imaginaries propagated particularly during the years from John F. Kennedy to Lyndon B. Johnson. In so doing, I will argue that Roth presents a paradoxical vision of Jewish American identity that could be acquired by performing perpetual self-effacement and submergence into the non-place of anonymity and doubleness, a mythic location of the post-ethnic Cold War American family. Levov's life becomes true part of the mythic narrative of American history when he realizes that his life, just like the nation's history, is a series of temporalities radically discontinued without any manageable detour ot divine bypass to cross over. Rather than indicating Roth's retraction from the postmodern understanding of subjectivity, the novel's historical realism, I will argue, serves to illuminate the postmodern conditions of American Cold War history and ethnic identity.

• 영어어문교육
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• 제12권3호
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• pp.211-226
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• 2006

This paper examines the crisis of the protagonist's Jewish identity in Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. Jewish values are centered on the philosophy of Judaism and Jewish history. Judaism is based on an ethical monotheism which is Bible-centered. It is characterized by its covenant with God, its humanism, and its emphasis on moral action. It provides essential reasons for man's existence and stresses human confidence and sufficiency. Jewish values can be found in words such as "good," "humanity," "dignity," "responsibility," and "sense of community." These positive Jewish values pervade Philip Roth's fiction paradoxically. Throughout especially Portnoy's Complaint, the protagonist fails to embrace Jewish values in contrast to Bellow or Malamud's heroes and repeat the same mistakes eliciting fits of laughter from readers. The protagonist suffers from his strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses perpetually warring with his extreme sexual longings against which he struggles. His desperation grows as he finds himself unable to channel his dissatisfaction and change his situations. His dominating mother and his confusion over Jewishness and Americanism are the main obstacles to his establishment of self-identity. He attempts to build up his gender identity and Jewish identity through his ego-centric sexual relationship with shikses(female gentiles). His inability to embody Jewish values leads to the failure to fulfill his identity. Roth paradoxically shows that the protagonist's realization of Jewishness is essential to the cure for his fragmented self.

• 비교문화연구
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• 제49권
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• pp.151-179
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• 2017

본 논문은 젊음과 늙음의 대립 구도에서 발생하는 시기와 질투를 필립 로스의 "죽어가는 동물"과 박범신의 "은교"를 통해서 고찰한다. "죽어가는 동물"에서 젊음에 대한 질투와 시기는 데이비드가 완벽하게 아름다운 몸을 가진 콘수엘라를 빼앗아갈 젊은 남자를 상상하는 데서 극적으로 나타난다. 데이비드의 상상 속에서 그의 경쟁자는 젊은 시절의 그 자신이면서 더 이상 그 자신이 아닌 남자다. 이 점에서 그가 콘수엘라를 빼앗기지 않으려고 질투하면서 동시에 자신은 잃어버렸지만 경쟁자는 누리고 있는 젊음에 대해 느끼는 시기심은 일종의 "자기시기심"이다. 데이비드에게 성애적 결합은 일시적으로 죽음에 복수하는 행위다. 그러나 늙음에 대한 자의식에서 비롯되는 젊음에 대한 시기와 질투로 인해 콘수엘라와의 성애적 관계에서 그는 계속 고통 받으며, 죽음에 대한 복수의 의미도 약화된다. 박범신의 "은교"에서 시기와 질투는 문학적 재능과 은교를 둘러싸고 이적요와 서지우 사이에서 발생한다. 서지우는 처음에는 이적요를 찬양하지만 대중작가로 성공한 이후에는 그의 문학적 재능을 시기하고 은교에 대한 그의 욕망을 간파한 후에는 격렬한 질투심에 휩싸인다. 그는 '젊음 대 늙음'의 구도로 자신과 이적요의 관계를 재설정하면서 그의 늙음을 모욕하기까지 한다. 이적요는 그런 서지우의 행위를 자연법칙을 모욕한 것으로 여기며 분노하는데, 그의 분노에는 젊음에 대한 시기심과 그의 욕망을 이해해주리라 믿었던 서지우에 대한 배신감이 뒤섞여 있다. 이런 부정적 감정들은 이적요로 하여금 서지우를 '처형'하게 만들고, 그를 '처형'한 자기 자신까지 '처벌'하게 만든다. 마지막에 죽음을 앞두고 있는 이적요를 사로잡는 것은 은교를 통해서 보는 고동치는 생명의 숨결과 그것의 아름다움이다.