Philip Roth
the ugly truth prophet in times of hypocrisy and political correctness
Keywords:
truth, morality, iconoclastic, hypocrisyAbstract
During his long career, spanning more than five decades, Philip Roth has published more than thirty novels and several volumes of literary criticism. Vilified and praised, Roth’s work is anything but bland. Perhaps the adjective best describing his work is “controversial”.
The reasons why almost every novel of his wreaks havoc in literary circles are two. The first is the author’s uncompromising stance on the issue of truth. Roth questions conventional morality by exposing it as a construct. The second reason is that the author’s policy of preaching the “gospel of truth” generates strong reaction from socially-established moral conventions. The tension generated by the public expectations to comply with the social paradigm and the author’s iconoclastic hostility to hypocrisy is the underlying feature of all of his works.
References
Brauner, David (2007). Philip Roth. Manchester University Press.
Greenberg, Robert M. (2003). “Transgression in the Fiction of Philip Roth”. Bloom’s Modern Critical Views. Chelsea House Publishers. USA.
Howells, W. D. (1958). “Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading”. Howells and James: A Double Billing. NY.
Mansfield, Nick (2000). Subjectivity. Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway. SRM Production Services. Malaysia.
McDaniel, John N. (2003). “Distinctive features of Roth’s Artistic Vision”. Bloom’s Modern Critical Views. Chelsea House Publishers. USA.
Posnock, Ross (2006). Philip Roth’s Rude Truth. The Art of Immaturity. Princeton University Press.
Roth, Philip (1975). Reading Myself and Others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.
Schwenger, Peter (1979). “The Masculine Mode”. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 5, No. 4. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Shostak, Debra (2007). “Roth and Gender”. The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. Cambridge University Press.
Tanner, Tony (1971). City of Words: American Fiction, 1950–1970. Harpercollins.
