‘Can’t you ever forget your Jews?’
or
Why Jews Aren’t Normal
The Unrecognizable Future of Philip Roth’s The Counterlife.
a lecture by Benjamin Schreier
Malvin and Lea Bank Assistant Professor of English and
Jewish Studies,
Author Nathan Zuckerman, the recurring character of no
fewer than 10 of Philip Roth’s books, is frequently read as Roth’s “alter-ego,” a
historicist tendency that referentially indexes Roth’s literary work to his life.
Taking its cue from Zuckerman’s claim at the end of The Counterlife that he
can only be a Jew where there are no other Jews, this paper argues that in
manifesting a repetition-with-difference of Roth’s Jewish travails, Zuckerman
counternormatively illuminates the desire for Jewish self-evidence, showing that
the discourse of “The Jew” demands a necessary critical text to supplement it.
Roth is important to Jewish American literary study not because his work offers
representational access to an already-legitimated historical narrative of Jewish
American assimilation, but because his characters do not know how to describe
themselves as Jews—and therefore because his work stages the fundamental
polemical labor of a Jewish literary history.
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
4:30 pm
Williams-Brice Building (Nursing) 502
Free And Open To The Public!
Sponsored by:
Columbia Jewish Community Center, Columbia Jewish Federation, USC Comparative Literature Program,
USC Department of English Language & Literature, USC Jewish Studies Program, USC Department of
Languages, Literatures, & Cultures