Philip Roth

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Philip Roth (left) with the Brazilian author Felipe Franco Munhoz (2013)

Philip Milton Roth [ ɹɑːθ ] (born March 19, 1933 in Newark , New Jersey ; died May 22, 2018 in New York City ) was an American writer . His novels , stories and essays have received numerous awards and earned him the reputation of an important contemporary novelist , who for many years was considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature .

Roth's works are often shaped by autobiography . His fictional characters share his origins from a lower-middle-class Jewish family, his hometown Newark, the later residences of New York and a farm in Connecticut as well as the experiences of his two marriages. After Roth's debut Goodbye, Columbus had received a positive response from the critics in 1959, his novel Portnoy's Complaint became a scandal ten years later. From the 1970s, the character Nathan Zuckerman accompanied his work through two trilogies and several individual novels. In October 2012, he withdrew from writing.

Life

Youth and first publications

Philip Roth was the second child of Herman Roth (1901–1989) and his wife Bess, nee Finkel (1904–1981). Both parents were assimilated American Jews of the second generation of immigrants. The maternal grandparents came from the area around Kiev, the Yiddish- speaking paternal grandparents, Sender and Bertha Roth, from Koslow in Galicia . Sender Roth had trained as a rabbi in Galicia and worked in a hat factory in Newark. Herman Roth, the middle of seven children and the first child in the United States, first worked in a factory after eight years of schooling, then became an insurance agent selling door-to-door life insurance. By his retirement he made it to the district director of Metropolitan Life . Philip Roth's brother, Sanford (Sandy) Roth (1927–2009), who was four years older than him, studied art at the Pratt Institute , became vice-president of the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather in Chicago and made a name for himself as a painter after his retirement.

Bucknell University campus

Philip Roth grew up in the Jewish district of Weequahic in Newark , New Jersey . His childhood was sheltered and largely carefree. The patriotism exemplified by the father was linked in the son with a love of the American national sport baseball . From 1946 to 1950 he attended Weequahic High School with almost exclusively Jewish classmates. At Rutgers University , Roth began studying law , then moved to Bucknell University in Lewisburg , Pennsylvania in 1951 , where he transferred to the philosophy faculty in 1952 and began studying English literature . In college , the young student increasingly emancipated himself from his parents' home, while the opposition to Bucknell's Christian-conservative orientation resulted in a conscious demarcation and strengthened individuality. Together with two fellow students, Roth founded the literary magazine Et cetera in 1952 , in which he published his first literary attempts. In 1954, Roth began his main studies at the University of Chicago , which he completed the following year with a Master of Arts . Under the influence of reading Saul Bellow , he distanced himself from the academic doctrine of literature. Instead of pursuing a university career, Roth signed up for two years in the army, but was released in 1956 with a spinal injury sustained at Fort Dix . He then returned to Chicago and gave writing courses at the university.

Both in the army and while employed at the university, Roth wrote various short stories that appeared in renowned literary magazines such as The Paris Review , Commentary or The New Yorker . After having searched for a long time for topic and style of expression, the author now resorted for the first time to his own experience of a Newarker Jew from the lower middle class , who would determine his later work. The short novel Goodbye, Columbus appeared in the Paris Review in 1958 and in the following year became the title story of Roth's first book, which was published by the well-known publisher Houghton Mifflin . The short story book received a lot of critical acclaim and in 1960 the National Book Award , with Roth being treated as the next writer of his generation. Well received Goodbye, Columbus in 1960 to Daroff Memorial Award of the Jewish Book Council , of "the best work of Jewish interest" distinguished. The award of this prize sparked heated controversy, so that the Jewish Book Council felt compelled to revise its selection criteria. Roth found himself suddenly caught between the extremes of fierce criticism and encouraging praise. Especially conservative Jewish reviewers accused him not only of anti-Semitism but also of Jewish self-contempt and damage to his own cause.

In October 1956, Philip Roth met the secretary Margaret Martinson Williams in Chicago, whom he married in February 1959. The divorced mother of two children of completely different social origins, who was four years older than him, initially gave Roth the feeling of both a challenge and a liberation. Later, however, the problems and arguments in their relationship increased, which the writer dealt with in retrospect in works such as When She Was Good ( Lucy Nelson or Die Moral , 1967) or My Life As a Man ( Mein Leben als Mann , 1974). In his autobiography The Facts ( The Facts , 1988) Margaret even advanced as Josie Jensen to the “counter-self”, to the “arch enemy and nemesis ” of the author. The couple separated in 1963, but Margaret Roth refused to consent to a divorce. Five years later she died in a car accident.

From 1958 onwards, the couple lived in New York on the Lower East Side of Manhattan , and in 1959 they spent seven months in Italy on a Guggenheim grant . Upon their return, they both settled in Iowa City , where Roth led the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa . The experiences in small-town Iowa far away from the American metropolises flowed into Roth's second novel Letting Go (Other People's Worries) , which was published in 1962, but in contrast to Roth's previously published volume of short stories Goodbye, Columbus caused mixed reactions from critics. Stanley Edgar Hyman, for example, criticized weaknesses in the narrative structure of the novel, the two narrative parts of which are only superficially connected, but praised what he saw as "the keenest eye for the details of American life since Sinclair Lewis ". Letting Go is also the first novel in which Roth, as in numerous later works, made the writings of his literary predecessors an integral part of the narrative, and is therefore often referred to as Roth's first " Henry James novel".

In 1962, the same year Letting Go was published, Roth became Writer-in-Residence at Princeton University . After separating from his wife, Roth began a five-year psychoanalysis with the New York psychiatrist Hans J. Kleinschmidt, who published the case history anonymously in a medical journal in 1967 under the title The Angry Act: The Role of Aggression in Creativity . Roth traveled to Israel for the first time in June 1963 . He participated in the American Jewish Congress , held discussions with Israeli intellectuals and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion . From 1965 to 1977 Roth had a lectureship in comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania .

From Portnoy to Zuckerman

Yaddo artists' colony

Roth skandalumwitterter bestselling novel Portnoy's Complaint (Portnoy's Complaint) was promoted in 1969 to a bang that made the writer widely publicized and also the discussion of literary pornography in American literary criticism. The equally comical and obscene monologue about the amalgamation of sexuality and feelings of guilt of an American Jew became a hotly debated bestseller, while myths spread about the author, who had withdrawn to the isolated artists' colony of Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, which he shared with his eponymous hero Equate Alexander Portnoy. The literary criticism ranged from enthusiastic approval to accusations of lack of seriousness. Again it was Jewish critics such as Leslie Fiedler who accused the author of disloyalty and even anti-Semitism , while critics such as Joseph C. Landis took a diametrically opposite position in the discussion about Roth and the Jewish-American narrative culture . Before the sudden popularity and fierce hostility, Roth retired to secluded Woodstock , and in 1972 he bought a farm in northwest Connecticut .

The politicization of Roth, which began in the McCarthy era , intensified during the Vietnam War . With the satire Our Gang (Our Gang) in 1971 he targeted the political style as well as the human and intellectual qualities of the American President Richard Nixon in, as Krieger writes, "bilious" form. The story The Breast (Breast) from the following year, the literature professor David Kepesh transformed in into a female breast, awakens echoes of Franz Kafka , the Roth has for a special devotion among his literary models. The search for Kafka's traces led to his first visit to Prague in 1972 , which was followed by annual trips until the author was refused an entry visa in 1977. In Czechoslovakia Roth got to know contemporary Czech literature and was in contact with Ivan Klíma , Milan Kundera and Ludvík Vaculík in particular . As a result, he promoted Eastern European literature in his American homeland and published the series Writers from the Other Europe at Penguin Books .

By The Professor of Desire (Professor of Desire) , the history of The Breast , 1977, Roth turned back from Surrealism from. The novel was dedicated to the British actress Claire Bloom , with whom the author had lived since 1975. The couple spent the winter in London and the summer in Connecticut. In the following trilogy The Ghost Writer ( The Ghost Writer , 1979), Zuckerman Unbound ( Zuckerman's liberation , 1981) and The Anatomy Lesson ( The Anatomy Lesson , 1983) made Roth the Jewish writer Nathan Zuckerman in permanent subjects of his paintings. As the author's alter ego, it mirrors Roth's own biography from the literary beginnings, the sudden popularity to the crisis after the death of his mother. Roth's own mother had died in May 1981. Roth's death in October 1989 was difficult; he had just recovered from heart surgery. In 1991 Roth dedicated the autobiographical novel Patrimony (My Life as a Son) to his father .

Late work and retreat

Thomas Hunter Hall of Hunter College

In 1987, in the loneliness of Connecticut, Roth experienced a breakdown caused by a sleeping pill with hallucinatory side effects. He made the experience, as well as the trial of the concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk in Jerusalem , whom he had followed as an observer, the starting point of the 1993 novel Operation Shylock , the encounter between a fictional Philip Roth and his doppelganger. The writer also felt increasingly isolated in London and returned to New York, where he moved into an apartment on the Upper West Side . He took over from 1988 to 1991 a professor of literature at Hunter College of the City University of New York . In 1990 he married his longtime partner Claire Bloom , but the marriage was divorced in 1994 after Roth's growing estrangement and severe depression, including a stay in a psychiatric clinic. Bloom dealt with the problematic relationship two years later in her memoir Leaving a Doll's House .

Roth's return from Europe was also accompanied by a renewed literary confrontation between the author and his home country. Sabbath's Theater (Sabbaths Theater) , which won the National Book Award in 1995, is considered the author's commitment to his American origins. In the American trilogy , the resurrected alter ego Zuckerman discovers the true identities of the protagonists of a sports idol in American Pastoral ( American Idyll , 1997), a radio star in I Married a Communist ( My Man, the Communist , 1998) and a professor emeritus in The Human Stain ( The Human Blemish , 2000) against the backdrop of changing American eras. American Pastoral was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 and is considered "a remarkable example of a literary interpretation of the descent of the initially so confident [American] post-war white society into the depths of uncertainty" as a result of the Vietnam War . In The Plot Against America ( The Plot Against America , 2004), the author writes in addition to his own life story and the history around and leaves America with Adolf Hitler pact, which pogroms against American Jews entails.

Philip Roth's last period of work is primarily characterized by the themes of age and transience, which the novels The Anatomy Lesson (1983) and Sabbath's Theater (1995) already referred to. With The Dying Animal ( The Dying Animal , 2001) and Exit Ghost (2007) adopted the author of his aged protagonist David Kepesh and Nathan Zuckerman. Roth's last work included four so-called "short novels", the quartet Everyman ( Jedermann , 2006), Indignation ( Outrage , 2008), The Humbling ( The Humiliation , 2009) and Nemesis (2010). In 2009, his older brother Sanford died.

In the early 2000s, Roth met the young assistant editor Lisa Halliday at his literary agency Andrew Wylie . A love affair developed from having lunch together, which culminated in a lifelong deep friendship. Halliday processed the love and friendship for Roth in the highly acclaimed autobiographical inspired novel Asymmetrie , which she completed in 2016. Roth, who read the manuscript, liked it.

In October 2012, Roth announced to the French culture magazine Les Inrocks that Nemesis was his last book. At the age of 74 he began to reread his favorite authors such as Dostoyevsky , Turgenew , Conrad and Hemingway as well as his own works. He came to the conclusion that he had made the best of his possibilities and did not want to continue working as an author, read or talk about new literature. As he explained later, he no longer felt the mental and physical strength in himself to cope with prolonged creative work. He lived his final years as a retiree on New York's Upper West Side . On May 22, 2018, Philip Roth died in a Manhattan hospital. As a grave, Roth had already chosen the cemetery at Bard College during his lifetime , where Hannah Arendt is also buried; he did not want a Jewish funeral.

Themes and motifs

Jewish-American identity

Philip Roth introduced himself to an Israeli audience with a frequently quoted statement about his cultural identity : He was an American writer who happened to write about Jews. However, according to Timothy Parrish, Roth's identity as an American cannot be separated from his identity as a Jew. The premise of Roth's work is that he experiences his historical situation as an American through the eyes of a Jew and with the background of a Jewish origin. In contrast to other ethnically influenced American authors such as Toni Morrison or Leslie Marmon Silko , Roth's identity, whether ethnic or not, is not stable. His focus is on the descendants of European Jews, who in America experience the freedom to decide for themselves whether and how they feel as Jews. At the same time, they are always aware of the two epochal events that determined Jewish history during their lifetime : the Holocaust and the founding of Israel . According to Parrish, Roth's works can be read as a search for an essential Jewish self and the discovery or creation of a self liberated from all cultural and social fetters.

Since his first publications, Roth, as a “rather idiosyncratic representative of the group of ' Jewish-American writers '”, has repeatedly engaged in controversial subjects or subjects. In Goodbye, Columbus he addresses the polar opposing ways of thinking and behaving in Jewish life in the lowlands of the Jewish quarter in Newark and the world of established Jews in the posh suburb of Short Hills; in the short story Eli, the Fanatic, the related theme of the confrontation between the two progressive, liberal Jews from Woodenton with a yeshiva , a strictly Orthodox - Talmudic school. The different solutions to conflicts in his early short stories show that he is primarily concerned with “intellectual playing through different behavior patterns”. Typical Jewish idiosyncrasies are not omitted from Roth in the criticism; although all of these stories take place in a Jewish milieu , Roth also tries to overcome its limitations. So the subject of social differences or class antagonisms in Goodbye, Columbus is not exclusively Jewish. Since then, Roth has been shaping the relationship to the Jewish tradition between postmodern uprooting and new orthodoxy and / or new fundamentalism , also in later works such as The Counterlife (1986), with a constant change of perspective on the basis of contrasting counter-designs .

After a number of massive attacks, especially against the intellectual and academic public, in which, for example, it was asked whether he would write in the same way if he had been persecuted as a Jew in Nazi Germany, Roth undertook Writing about in the 1963 essay Commentary Jews attempted to explain and justify his position as a Jewish writer in (literary) theory as well. He opposes misunderstanding the fictional character of his literary texts and interpreting them as authentic documentation of Jewish life from which an acceptable system of values ​​can be derived. Fictional texts would not be written to affirm principles or beliefs that would be shared by everyone without contradiction, nor would they serve to ensure the appropriateness of feelings and feelings for the reader. As Roth expressly emphasizes, literature must have the freedom to “explore moral fantasy” (meaning: “freedom to explore moral fantasy”). Roth defends himself against the accusation of denigrating the Jewish heritage or his own "nest pollution" with the argument that his stories are contributions to a long overdue enlightenment about the Jews: "Jews are people who are not what anti-Semites say they are" (German translated: "Jews are people who are not what anti-Semites say about them"). With his works he only wanted to make a contribution to overcoming the rhetoric of Jewish self-congratulation and self-pity ("the oratory of self-congratulation and self-pity").

For Alan Cooper, Roth was a child of his time: he grew up cut off from the culture of European Jews (which he only got to know and researched later) and without a deeper knowledge of the traditions of Judaism, which were rather replaced by family traditions. For his protagonists, the Jewish question is reduced to the question of how they can participate in the American dream despite their Jewishness . Roth's characters reflect the social development of the Jews in America, their increasing assimilation and security, their stepping out of the fear that is decisive in early stories such as On the Air , to cosmopolitan freedom in late novels such as The Counterlife with the testing of diaspora and Zionism . According to Cooper, the Rothian protagonist in his individual dilemma, which is not immediately recognizable as a representative Jewish dilemma, suffers on behalf of the reader, thus picking up on a tradition of Jewish prophets from Hosea and Jeremiah , which was softened by Kafka in the 20th century finds again.

Playfulness and seriousness

Cover of The Great American Novel

In a 1974 interview, Joyce Carol Oates noted a shift in Roth's work from the moral seriousness of Letting Go and When She Was Good to the playfulness of Our Gang or The Great American Novel . Roth contradicted a categorical separation between moral and comic works and formulated: "Pure playfulness and deadly seriousness are my best friends". In the early essay Writing American Fiction (1960), Roth described his position as an American author in the mid-twentieth century: In a culture which, in its madness, surpasses every imagination and whose values ​​are too distorted to still believe in them, an author does not lose only his cultural home, but also his credibility as a chronicler of the conditions. Instead of turning away from reality, Roth responded with satire , which he defined as "moral indignation translated into comic art". Roth's satire often arises from the disparity between ideals and reality, the naive disappointment of his heroes and the disillusionment of the American dream.

In a letter to a reviewer of Portnoy's Complaint , Roth announced that his worldview was " embedded in parody , burlesque , slapstick , ridicule , insult, abuse, abuse, joke , nonsense, in recklessness and play , that is, in the methods and procedures of comedy " . According to Ben Siegel and Jay L. Halio, the works show a growing interest in comedies, which has developed from the outrageous and hilarious Portnoy's Complaint to the interplay of comedy and tragedy in the late novels, in which death is becoming the dominant theme . According to Sabbath's Theater , a novel which many reviewers believe to have trumped Portnoy , Roth's comedic development showed a turning point when American Pastoral turned the initial comedy into a profound tragedy. For Siegel, the reason why Roth's special humor has become more and more surrealistic and obsessive in the course of his works lies not only in the attempt to surpass reality, but in the effort to penetrate into the most private and darkest areas of the human soul. Roth takes the hidden piety and hypocrisy of the people as well as their madness and exuberance in their sights.

As a consistent trademark of Roth's work, Ross Posnock makes a rudeness and roughness, which often breaks out in the form of verbose ranting tirades. It ranges from the raw outburst of Alexander Portnoy in his psychotherapy to the rebellion against the tyranny of political correctness in The Human Stain . Mickey Sabbath expresses this artistic credo at one point: “to affront and affront and affront til there was no one on earth unaffronted.” (German meaning: “insult and insult and insult until there is no one left on earth who is not offended. ”) The rudeness is not only a source of stylistic energy, but also a fundamental moral position, an attack on the state of inhumanity disguised as niceness, as Nathan Zuckerman puts it in The Anatomy Lesson . Roth is thus directed against the social forces of obedience, prohibition and oppression, essential components of mature adulthood, which is why Posnock recognizes an “art of immaturity” in which Roth disregards cultural barriers and abandons himself completely to aesthetic pleasure, in the style of a Cervantes 'or Nabokovs .

Roth's counter-life

In a review of Operation Shylock , Robert Alter Roth's work summed up the simple denominator: “Philip Roth always writes about Philip Roth.” Roth's works were often read in this form as autobiographical , sometimes even as narcissistic . Roth, on the other hand, described his literary alter ego Nathan Zuckerman in an interview with Hermione Lee as a “play”, a “transformation act”, the result of a “gift of the novelist”: “You distort your own biography, caricature it, bend and undermine it, you exploits them ". The “mask of the first-person narrator” is “the best mask ever”. Debra Shostak sees the art of metamorphosis, the process of "transforming the ego-madness into an er-madness", as the basis of Roth's writing, which enables him to take on a variety of different perspectives, even if he runs the risk of the reader to be confused with the mask.

Roth's protagonists are similar to each other. They are almost always male, almost always Jewish, often writers, and usually either Newark, New Jersey or the Berkshires with a few trips to Israel. The most common appearance is Nathan Zuckerman, who is introduced as the alter ego of the fictional writer Peter Tarnopol in My Life as a Man , before he traces Roth's writing career in the Zuckerman Bound trilogy and ultimately only has a framework function in the American trilogy . David Kepesh serves in three novels spanning three decades to explore the changed perception of sexuality and male self-design: from the emasculation in The Breast to the dilemma of sexual infidelity in The Professor of Desire to age and decay in The Dying Animal . Finally, in some works such as Deception or Operation Shylock , Roth has a protagonist named Philip Roth appear, who further confuses the interweaving of fiction and autobiography for the reader. Even the supposedly authentic autobiographical report The Facts is undermined in its credibility by a fictional letter from the fictional character Nathan Zuckerman. For Shostak, all these masquerades serve to reveal, disguise and rewrite one's own biography at the same moment and to reveal the literary process of designing an identity.

On the occasion of the baseball novel The Great American Novel , Roth conducted an interview with himself in the course of which he described a "determined zigzag course" of his career, in which each new book was a radical U-turn from the previous publication. For Shostak, not only the form of the interview was typical for Roth, whose work forms a polyphonic dialogue between various avatars with the author. The individual works can also be understood as counter-texts to their predecessors and as a sequence of “what if” questions. For example, the moderate Midwestern novel When She Was Good, reminiscent of Henry James , and the defiantly dysfunctional voice in Portnoy's Complaint form two opposing responses to the criticism of Roth's early works on Jewish self-image. The novel The Counter Life (against life) is even completely from the alternative biographies of the two brothers Henry and Nathan Zuckerman. Such a dialogical instead of dogmatic juxtaposition of different positions is characteristic of Roth, according to Shostak, who identified “growing distrust in 'positions', including my own”, as an important driving force behind his work.

To individual works

Goodbye, Columbus

The early stories of Philip Roth, published in 1959 in the anthology Goodbye, Columbus , all raise the question of Jewish identity in America, which is perceived as an obstacle to reinventing oneself in America's social and cultural mobility. The question of whether you define yourself as a Jew or not as a Jew becomes the central question of life for the characters. In the short stories Eli, the Fanatic (Eli, the Fanatic) and The Conversion of the Jews (The conversion of the Jews) are uncertain, back and hergerissenen protagonists in conflict with their Jewish communities. In the title novella Goodbye, Columbus , the young Neil Klugman has to say goodbye to the dream of easy love as well as the easy accessibility of the American dream .

Portnoy's Complaint

Envelope of Portnoy's Complaint

Portnoy's Complaint ( Portnoy's Complaint , 1969) marks a break in style in Roth's work. While the author had previously striven for literary seriousness, he now discovered comedy as a means of conveying serious statements. The novel consists of a monologue by the psychotherapy patient Alexander Portnoy, who tells of the overprotected growing up in a Jewish family and his sexual obsessions inhibited by feelings of guilt. In doing so, Roth makes use of the means of satire, exaggeration and unbridled obscenity with which Portnoy's outcry breaks out. The public reaction to the novel was enormous. It became a bestseller , enthusiastically celebrated and harshly criticized (especially from the Jewish side, from whom Roth wasaccused ofserving anti-Semitic stereotypes ). It was often understood as an autobiographical revelation. In Roth's literary career it remained the book with which he was identified in public and which many people at least know from hearsay.

The Kepesh novels

In a total of three novels, Philip Roth's protagonist is David Kepesh, a Jewish literary scholar and professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook . In the novella The Breast ( Breast , 1972) transforms Kepesh into a 155-pound female breast . Throughout the book, he wrestles with his reluctant desires to indulge in physical urges, such as during the daily ablutions of a nurse or visits to his girlfriend, or to remain rational. Kepesh compares his fate with that of Gregor Samsas in Franz Kafka's story The Metamorphosis or Kowaljows in Nikolai Gogol's story The Nose .

Self, David Kepesh 1977 in The Professor of Desire (Professor of Desire) , the prequel to The Breast and 2001 in The Dying Animal (The Dying Animal) , describing the relationship of the now old university professor to a much younger Cuban exile student. From this initial constellation of a love affair, Roth draws a link to the confrontation with the legacies of the sexual revolution , human loneliness in modern single society and the power of death.

The Zuckerman novels

With the Jewish-American writer Nathan Zuckerman, Philip Roth created an alter ego in which he reflected his own biography and his literary career. Zuckerman occurs for the first time in the early 1970s in two short stories on which Roth in Modern Art and Esquire published, and in the novel My Life As a Man ( My Life as a Man , 1974) are output as works of the protagonist Peter Tarnopol. From 1979, Zuckerman himself protagonist of the so-called Zuckerman trilogy that a young writer of his search for a paternal role model in The Ghost Writer ( The Ghost Writer , 1979) about the sudden success with an autobiographical understood by the public scandal novel in Zuckerman Unbound ( Zuckerman's Liberation , 1981) to physical and creative breakdown in The Anatomy Lesson ( Die Anatomiestunde , 1983). In the subsequent epilogue The Prague Orgy ( The Prague Orgy , 1985), which confronts Zuckerman with the oppression of his Czechoslovak colleagues, the trilogy ends, according to Roth, “at the shrine of suffering, in Kafka's occupied Prague”.

Envelope from I Married A Communist

The novel The Counterlife ( Gegenleben , 1986) is narrated on the one hand by Nathan Zuckerman, on the other by his brother Henry, who emigrated from America and turned to Zionism in Israel . The opposing positions of the brothers serve to further Zuckerman’s self-determination as an American Jew. After Roth had buried his alter ego in The Counterlife as well as in Deception ( Deception , 1990), at the end of the millennium he rose again as the narrator of the so-called American trilogy , which was derived from American Pastoral ( American Idyll , 1997), I. Married A Communist ( My man communist , 1998) and the human Stain ( the human Stain , 2000) is. In these novels, Zuckerman takes a back seat and becomes a chronicler of American life in different epochs. Only in his novel Exit Ghost , published in 2007 , the title of which is taken from a stage direction from Macbeth , does Roth finally relinquish his "ghost", Zuckerman, who is now over 70 years old.

Autobiographical writings

Although many, if not all the works of Philip Roth's can not be read autobiographical, protrude some unencrypted autobiographies from his oeuvre out: In The Facts ( The Facts , 1988) Roth describes his career as a writer until the publication of Portnoy's Complaint , framed by a fictional correspondence between Roth and his protagonist Nathan Zuckerman in the prologue and epilogue. In Patrimony ( Mein Leben als Sohn , 1991), Roth completely dispenses with literary games and deceptions on the part of the reader and reports honestly about cancer and the death of his father.

Hana Wirth-Nesher joins these two autobiographies with the novel The Plot against America ( Conspiracy against America , 2004), which links an alternative world story about a fascist takeover in America with the personal family history of the Roths: “When The Facts describes the artist's becoming and in Patrimony the becoming of the son, then The Plot against America is about the becoming of the Jew. ”David Gooblar, on the other hand, sees two other novels as at least partially non-fictional: Deception ( Deception , 1990), that of an author's notebook written named Philip, the unique features Philip Roth's wearing, and operation Shylock (1993), the subtitle as confession (confession) is called, and tells of an impostor who pretends to be in Israel as Philip Roth and the identity of the author Wreak havoc and havoc.

Sabbath's theater

Envelope from Everyman

Sabbath's Theater ( Sabbaths Theater , 1995) tells the story of former puppeteer Mickey Sabbath. The novel won the National Book Award in 1995and isconsidered Roth's masterpieceby some critics, including Harold Bloom . The main character plays with people, mostly women, just as he once did with his marionettes. The death of his longtime secret lover Drenka plunges Sabbath into a crisis of meaning that confronts him with the uselessness of his life. The recurring ghost of his dead mother advises him to commit suicide as a fitting end to a botched life.

Nemeses

Under the collective title Nemeses (translated: " Nemeseis ") Roth presented his last works between 2006 and 2010, four so-called "Short Novels" with the titles Everyman ( Jedermann , 2006), Indignation ( Outrage , 2008), The Humbling ( The Humiliation , 2009) and Nemesis (2010). The thematically related novels deal with the question of how the individual asserts himself against adverse living conditions and what sometimes fatal effects his decisions have.

bibliography

The works

If published, the ISBNs refer to the German-language hardback edition.

Text compilations

  • 1980: A Philip Roth Reader
  • 1985: Zuckerman Bound (German 1986, Der gefesselte Zuckerman ), ISBN 3-446-14697-0 (= the Zuckerman trilogy including the epilogue in one volume)

Awards

In 2000 Saul Bellow proposed Philip Roth to the Swedish Academy for the Nobel Prize for Literature . The accusation that the academy deliberately overlooks Roth's achievements in selecting the Nobel Prize winner each year has been one of the truisms of international feuilletons since the 2000s. According to some critics, the accusation turned out to be justified in 2008, when the chairman of the jury responsible for the Nobel Prize for Literature made public general reservations about North American literature and denied it deserving of an award. Ulrich Greiner summed up Roth's rejection by the Nobel Prize Committee as follows: “The Swedes, however, love authors who help to improve the world. Philip Roth only adds something to their knowledge. "

literature

  • Murray Baumgarten and Barbara Gottfried: Understanding Philip Roth . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 1990, ISBN 0-87249-685-6 .
  • Harold Bloom (Ed.): Philip Roth . Chelsea House, Philadelphia 2003, ISBN 0-7910-7446-3 .
  • Alan Cooper: Philip Roth and the Jews . State University of New York Press, Albany 1996, ISBN 0-7914-2910-5 .
  • Thomas David: Philip Roth . Rowohlt's monographs. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2013, ISBN 978-3-499-50578-2 .
  • Volker Hage : Philip Roth. Books and encounters . Hanser, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-446-23016-3 .
  • Jay L. Halio (Ed.): Turning up the flame. Philip Roth's later novels . University of Delaware Press, Newark 2005, ISBN 0-87413-902-3 .
  • Till Kinzel: The Tragedy and Comedy of American Life. A study on Zuckerman's America in Philip Roth's America Trilogy (American Studies Monograph Series, 137), Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 2006, ISBN 3-8253-5223-4 .
  • Gottfried Krieger: Philip Roth . In: Martin Christadler (Ed.): American literature of the present in single representations (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 412). Kröner, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , pp. 129-154.
  • Timothy Parrish (Ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2007, ISBN 978-0-521-68293-0 .
  • Ross Posnock: Philip Roth's Rude Truth. The Art of Immaturity . Princeton University Press, Princeton 2006, ISBN 978-0-691-11604-4 .
  • Claudia Roth Pierpont : Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2013, ISBN 978-0-374-28051-2 .
  • Derek Parker Royal (Ed.): Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author . Praeger, Westport 2005, ISBN 0-275-98363-3 .
  • Elaine B. Safer: Mocking the Age. The later novels of Philip Roth . State University of New York Press, Albany 2006, ISBN 0-7914-6710-4 .
  • George J. Searles (Ed.): Conversations with Philip Roth . University Press of Mississippi, Jackson and London 1992, ISBN 978-0-878-05558-6 .
  • Mark Shechner: Up society's ass, copper. Rereading Philip Roth . University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 2003, ISBN 0-299-19350-0 .
  • Debra B. Shostak: Philip Roth. Countertexts, counterlives . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, 2004, ISBN 1-57003-542-3 .
  • Ben Siegel, Jay L. Halio (Eds.): Playful and Serious. Philip Roth as a comic writer . University of Delaware Press, Newark 2010, ISBN 978-0-87413-094-2 .
  • Wiebke-Maria Wöltje: "My finger on the pulse of the nation". Intellectual protagonists in Philip Roth's novels. (Mosaic, 26), WVT, Trier 2006, ISBN 3-88476-827-1 .

Movie

  • Philip Roth, no complaints. Documentary, France, 2011, 50 min., Written and directed: William Karel and Livia Manera, production: Cinétévé, arte France, German premiere: September 19, 2011.

Web links

Commons : Philip Roth  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Philip Roth: On Writing, Aging And 'Nemesis' . Interview with Terry Gross on WBUR , October 14, 2010.
  2. ↑ Philip Roth: The Legacy - Not I, the novelist, but my father, the insurance agent, was the memory of the city of New Jersey. Speech to the New Jersey Historical Society , given in October 1992. Translated into German and published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , May 26, 2018, accessed on May 28, 2018.
  3. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. Pp. 7-8.
  4. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. Pp. 16-17.
  5. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. Pp. 25-26.
  6. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. Pp. 31-36.
  7. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. P. 40.
  8. ↑ See the information from William H. Pritchard: Roth, Philip in the Oxford Research Encyclopedias - Literature , published online in July 2017. Accessed March 7, 2018.
  9. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. Pp. 41-44.
  10. ↑ Gottfried Krieger: Philip Roth . In: Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in individual representations. Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , p. 129.
  11. ↑ See in detail Gottfried Krieger: Philip Roth . In: Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in individual representations. Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , p. 129 and Thomas David: Philip Roth. Pp. 56-57.
  12. ↑ Philip Roth: The facts . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2000, ISBN 3-499-24004-1 , pp. 229, 241.
  13. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. Pp. 49-52, 69, 148.
  14. ↑ In Letting Go , Hyman praises “finest eye for the details of American life since Sinclair Lewis”. Quoted from William H. Pritchard: Roth, Philip . See William H. Pritchard: Roth, Philip in the Oxford Research Encyclopedias - Literature , published online July 2017. Retrieved March 7, 2018.
  15. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. Pp. 63-64, 148.
  16. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. Pp. 66-71, 148.
  17. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. Pp. 73, 148.
  18. ↑ See Gottfried Krieger: Philip Roth . In: Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in individual representations. Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , p. 129.
  19. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. Pp. 83-84.
  20. ↑ See Gottfried Krieger: Philip Roth . In: Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in individual representations. Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , pp. 130ff. See also Thomas David: Philip Roth . Rowohlt's monographs. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2013, ISBN 978-3-499-50578-2 , p. 49, 56ff.
  21. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. Pp. 87-90, 94.
  22. ↑ Gottfried Krieger: Philip Roth . In: Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in individual representations. Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , p. 129f. See also Thomas David: Philip Roth. Pp. 74, 92-93.
  23. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. Pp. 94-103.
  24. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. Pp. 107, 116.
  25. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. P. 112.
  26. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. Pp. 120-121.
  27. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. Pp. 117-120.
  28. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. Pp. 122-125, 149.
  29. ↑ Martin Schulze: History of American Literature · From the beginnings to today . Propylaen Verlag, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-549-05776-8 , pp. 552 and 553.
  30. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. Pp. 130-141.
  31. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. Pp. 126-127.
  32. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. P. 149.
  33. ↑ Alexandra Alter: Lisa Halliday's Debut Novel Is Drawing Comparisons to Philip Roth. Though Not for the Reasons You Might Think . In. The New York Times February 2, 2018
  34. ↑ Karen Krüger: The whole book was scary! . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of July 30, 2018
  35. ↑ Philip Roth: “Némésis sera mon dernier livre” at lesinrocks.com, October 7, 2012 (accessed November 10, 2012).
  36. ^ Charles McGrath: Philip Roth, Towering Novelist Who Explored Lust, Jewish Life and America, Dies at 85 . In: The New York Times, May 22, 2018.
  37. ↑ Funeral without a kaddish . In: Jüdische Allgemeine, May 28, 2018.
  38. ↑ Timothy Parrish: Roth and ethnic identity . In: Timothy Parrish (Ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2007, ISBN 978-0-521-68293-0 , pp. 127-130.
  39. ↑ Gottfried Krieger: Philip Roth . In: Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in individual representations. Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , p. 133.
  40. ↑ See Hubert Zapf: American Literary History . Metzler Verlag, 2nd act. Edition, Stuttgart a. Weimar, ISBN 3-476-02036-3 , pp. 448ff. See also Gottfried Krieger in detail: Philip Roth . In: Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in individual representations. Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , p. 131f.
  41. ↑ Philip Roth: Writing about Jews . In: Commentary , 36, 1963, pp. 446-452, here pp. 446f. and 451f. Quoted from: Gottfried Krieger: Philip Roth . In: Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in individual representations. Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , p. 134f. On the violent attacks on Roth during these years, cf. also the information in William H. Pritchard: Roth, Philip in the Oxford Research Encyclopedias - Literature , published online in July 2017. Accessed March 7, 2018. Despite his justification in the essay Writing about Jews , Roth continued to face sharp attacks for a long time exposed on the part of its Jewish-American critics. For example, Irving Howe , who had been extremely praiseworthy about Roth's first book in 1962, wrote in an article in the Commentary in 1972 that Roth was a writer with a “thin personal culture [...] at the end of a tradition which can no longer nourish his imagination "; an author who simply made the choice "to tear himself away from that [Jewish] tradition". Quoted from Morris Dickstein: Jewish-American Fiction. Published online in the Oxford Research Encyclopedias - Literature July 2017, accessible at literature.oxfordre.com . Retrieved March 8, 2018.
  42. ^ Alan Cooper: Philip Roth and the Jews . State University of New York Press, Albany 1996, ISBN 0-7914-2910-5 , pp. 7, 21, 289-290.
  43. ↑ Philip Roth: After eight books . In: Reread own and other books . Rowohlt, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-499-24881-8 , p. 149.
  44. ↑ Philip Roth: Writing American Novels . In: Reread own and other books . Rowohlt, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-499-24881-8 , pp. 247-271.
  45. ↑ Philip Roth: About Our Gang . In: Reread own and other books . Rowohlt, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-499-24881-8 , p. 75.
  46. ^ Judith Paterson Jones, Guinevera A. Nance: Philip Roth . Ungar, New York 1981, ISBN 0-8044-6320-4 , pp. 129-133.
  47. ↑ Philip Roth: Document dated July 27, 1969 . In: Reread own and other books . Rowohlt, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-499-24881-8 , p. 48.
  48. ↑ Ben Siegel, Jay L. Halio (Ed.): Playful and Serious. Philip Roth as a comic writer . University of Delaware Press, Newark 2010, ISBN 978-0-87413-094-2 , pp. 11-14.
  49. ↑ Philip Roth: Sabbath's Theater . Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston 1995, ISBN 0-395-73982-9 , p. 198.
  50. ^ Ross Posnock: Philip Roth's Rude Truth. The Art of Immaturity. Princeton University Press, Princeton 2006, ISBN 978-0-691-11604-4 , pp. Xi, xiii, xvii, xx, 2.
  51. ^ "Philip Roth is always writing about Philip Roth". Robert Alter: The Splash . In: The New Republic, April 5, 1993, p. 33.
  52. ↑ Philip Roth: Interview with the Paris Review . In: Reread own and other books . Rowohlt, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-499-24881-8 , pp. 187-189.
  53. ↑ Philip Roth: Interview with the London Sunday Times . In: Reread own and other books . Rowohlt, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-499-24881-8 , p. 173.
  54. ^ Debra B. Shostak: Philip Roth. Countertexts, counterlives . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, 2004, ISBN 1-57003-542-3 , pp. 8-9.
  55. ^ Debra B. Shostak: Philip Roth. Countertexts, counterlives . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, 2004, ISBN 1-57003-542-3 , pp. 7, 10, 17.
  56. ↑ Philip Roth: About the Great American Novel . In: Reread own and other books . Rowohlt, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-499-24881-8 , p. 115.
  57. ↑ Philip Roth: About the chest . In: Reread own and other books . Rowohlt, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-499-24881-8 , p. 98.
  58. ^ Debra B. Shostak: Philip Roth. Countertexts, counterlives . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, 2004, ISBN 1-57003-542-3 , pp. 3-6, 13.
  59. ^ Victoria Aarons: American-Jewish identity in Roth's short fiction . In: Timothy Parrish (Ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2007, ISBN 978-0-521-68293-0 , pp. 10-11.
  60. ↑ David Gooblar: The Major Phases of Philip Roth . Continuum, London 2011, ISBN 978-1-4411-6970-9 , pp. 27, 30.
  61. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth . Pp. 76-79.
  62. ^ Alan Cooper: The Alex Perplex . In: Harold Bloom (Ed.): Portnoy's Complaint: Modern Critical Interpretations . Chelsea House, New York 2004, ISBN 0-7910-7582-6 , pp. 141-153.
  63. ^ Bernard F. Rogers, Jr .: In the American Grain (Portnoy's Complaint) . In: Harold Bloom (Ed.): Portnoy's Complaint: Modern Critical Interpretations . Chelsea House, New York 2004, ISBN 0-7910-7582-6 , p. 27.
  64. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. Pp. 102, 108, 112, quotation: p. 108.
  65. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. P. 133.
  66. ↑ Volker Hage: Philip Roth. Books and Encounters , pp. 103-104, 141.
  67. ↑ Klaus Brinkbäumer, Volker Hage: "Bush Is Too Horrendous to Be Forgotten" . Interview with Philip Roth. In: Spiegel Online from August 2, 2008.
  68. ↑ Hana Wirth-Nesher: Roth's Autobiographical Writings . In: Timothy Parrish (Ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2007, ISBN 978-0-521-68293-0 , p. 159.
  69. ↑ David Gooblar: The Major Phases of Philip Roth . Continuum, London 2011, ISBN 978-1-4411-6970-9 , pp. 110, 112.
  70. ^ "If The Facts is the making of the artist and Patrimony is the making of the son, The Plot Against America is the making of the Jew." Hana Wirth-Nesher: Roth's Autobiographical Writings . In: Timothy Parrish (Ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2007, ISBN 978-0-521-68293-0 , pp. 159, 167-168, citation p. 167.
  71. ↑ David Gooblar: The Major Phases of Philip Roth . Continuum, London 2011, ISBN 978-1-4411-6970-9 , p. 110.
  72. ^ Philip Roth: Nemeses: Everyman / Indignation / The Humbling / Nemesis at google books.
  73. ^ Members: Philip Roth. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 23, 2019 .
  74. ^ Alison Flood: Philip Roth Wins Man Booker International Prize. In: The Guardian . May 18, 2011, accessed May 18, 2011 .
  75. ↑ Notice on the website of the Prince of Asturias Prize, accessed on June 6, 2012.
  76. ↑ in New York appointed by the French Foreign Minister as Commander of the Legion of Honor , Tagesanzeiger (Zurich) of September 28, 2013, accessed September 30, 2013.
  77. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. P. 137.
  78. ↑ People: Bruce Lee, Janet Jackson, Philip Roth The New York Times , October 26, 2005; Where did Philip Roth's Nobel prize get to? The Guardian , May 24, 2007; Long-term candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature ( Memento from October 11, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Spiegel Online; Should Philip Roth finally get the Nobel Prize? FAZ , June 23, 2008; Nobel Prize for Literature: Just No Ami Focus , October 3, 2008; Philip Roth honored for his complete works , Die Zeit , May 18, 2011.
  79. ↑ No Ami , Focus from October 3, 2008.
  80. ^ Ulrich Greiner : Deadly game . In: The time of March 4, 2010.
personal data
SURNAME Roth, Philip
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Roth, Philip Milton (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 19, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Newark , New Jersey
DATE OF DEATH May 22, 2018
Place of death New York City