Ghost-Writing: Philip Roth's Portrait of the Artist
In writing a trilogy of novels on the life and times of Nathan Zuckerman, American Jewish Writer, Philip Roth has waded manfully into a tradition even more thickly and brilliantly populated than the one he selected as literary background for The Breast. If the grotesque metamorphosis of David Kepesh...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
University of Pennsylvania Press
1988
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| In: |
AJS review
Year: 1988, Volume: 13, Issue: 1/2, Pages: 153-169 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | In writing a trilogy of novels on the life and times of Nathan Zuckerman, American Jewish Writer, Philip Roth has waded manfully into a tradition even more thickly and brilliantly populated than the one he selected as literary background for The Breast. If the grotesque metamorphosis of David Kepesh into a six-foot, one-hundred-and-fifty-pound female breast compels us to compare Roths novel with some of the great texts of Kafka and Gogol, in Zuckerman Bound Roth invokes the more formidable context of James, Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Mann, and Gide (to mention only a few), several of whose artist-portraits are identified in the trilogy and all implied. Roth has said in an interview that the novelty of this particular portrait is that it describes the comedy that an artistic vocation can turn out to be in the U.S.A.1 The comedy pertains not only to the career of Zuckerman himself, a series of zany encounters with writers, readers, and critics, whose responses to one Zuckerman fiction become the action of the next, but also to Roths typical strategy of challenging and recreating any prior tradition or convention, however sacrosanct. The crux of Rothian comedy is to expose, embarrass, and ridicule, to break bonds and boundaries, pieties and platitudes. |
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| ISSN: | 1475-4541 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Association for Jewish Studies, AJS review
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0364009400002336 |