Philip Roth and the Body: Jewishness, Gender, and Race

(Hardback)

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To what extent can the leaky, porous bodies in Philip Roths fiction be read as symbols of resistance against anti-Semitism, white supremacy, and racism Philip Roth and the Body questions the symbolic functionality of the corporeal in Roths main works of fiction, particularly as sites of gender and racial identification for Roths protagonists. In his recurrent employment of the abject, Roth throws into doubt the body as a coherent, stable entity, undermining his male characters determinations of gendered and racial otherness through his porously unstable bodies. Joshua Lander draws on the work of Zygmunt Bauman and his theory of the conceptual Jew to argue that Roths fiction is yoked together by a shared interest in how anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jewish difference centered around the body pervasively inform American Jewish identities. The book also contends that Roth resists American white nationalism by transforming the bodys ejaculations, excretions, secretions, and expulsions into symbols of difference that he repeatedly ties to Jewishness. At the same time, this study highlights how Roth's novels, through his focus on Jewish men, risk the reification of Americas sexist social structures as they intersect with the very racism Roth seeks to undermine. Philip Roth and the Bodys examination of how bodies in Roths fiction are entities troubled within his prose renews conversations about whose bodies matter, both in Roth studies and in the context of Americas racial and social politics.

Author Bio

Joshua Lander obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Glasgow in 2019, where his research focused on the novels of Philip Roth and the Jewish body. He currently works as a secondary school teacher for Edinburgh city council, researching Holocaust pedagogies and British Jewish literary responses to the Holocaust.