Playful and serious : Philip Roth as a comic writer / edited by Ben Siegel and Jay L. Halio.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Siegel, Ben, 1925-

Halio, Jay L.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Roth, Philip, 1933-2018--Criticism and interpretation.

Roth, Philip.

Comic, The, in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (276 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Newark : University of Delware Press, c2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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."

Contents:

Contents; Acknowledgments; Introduction; A Comic Crisis of Faith: Philip Roth's ""Conversion of the Jews"" and ""Eli, the Fanatic""; Philip Roth's Comic Realism in Goodbye, Columbus; Masturbation and Its Discontents; or Serious Relief: Freudian Comedy in Portnoy's Complaint; Affairs of the Breast: Philip Roth and David Kepesh; The Body in Shame: Philip Roth's Physical Comedy; Plots against America: Language and the Comedy of Conspiracy in Philip RothÌs Early Fiction; The Myths of Summer: Philip Roth's The Great American Novel

Operation Shylock: The Double, the Comic, and the Quest for IdentityRoth's Falstaff: Transgressive Humor in Sabbath's Theater; SabbathÌs Complaint: Philip Roth's Black Comedy in Sabbath's Theater; Deadly Farce in the Comedy of Philip Roth; The Human Stain: A Satiric Tragedy of the Politically Incorrect; ""To Endure and Go On"": Comedy, Castration, and the Phallus in Philip Roth's Exit Ghost; Indignation: The Opiates of the Occident; Contributors; Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0-87413-509-5

OCLC:

647843328