• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.5
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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.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.2
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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.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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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.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.3
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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.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.49
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• pp.151-179
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• 2017

This paper explores envy and jealousy caused by conflicts between youth and old age in Philip Roth's The Dying Animal and Bumshin Park's Eungyo. In Roth's Novel, David became envious and jealous of a fictional man when he imagined "the pornography of jealousy." In this pornography, his imagined rival was a young man who was once David himself but was no longer young who might steal Consuela away from him. In this sense, David's envy towards this young rival can be called "self-envy." David considered sex an act of revenge on death. But his envy and jealousy undermined his power and effect. In Eungyo, envy and jealousy arose between Lee and Seo when they came into conflict because of Lee's literary talent and Eungyo. At first, Seo admired Lee. But he grew envious of Lee's talent when he gained popularity and success by publishing Lee's novels under his own name. He was engulfed in jealousy when he detected Lee's sexual desire for Eungyo. He even insulted Lee's old age, which enraged Lee. Lee's rage was mixed with his envy toward the young and his sense of betrayal against Seo. With Seo's death, all these negative feelings disappeared. Instead, Lee was captivated by the pulsing breath of life and its beauty he observed in Eungyo.