Roth and Celebrity

Contributions by Derek Royal, James Bloom, Ira Nadel, Miriam Jaffe Foger, Debra Shostak, Matthew Shipe, Maggie McKinley, Brett Ashley Kaplan, Nigel Rodenhurst, Mark Shechner Edited by Aimee L. Pozorski

Publication date:

20 September 2012

Length of book:

220 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739170618

Roth and Celebrity is composed of 10 original essays that consider the vexed and ambivalent relationship between Philip Roth and his own celebrity as revealed both in personal interviews as well as in the fiction that spans his publishing history. With its simultaneous interest in American popular culture and the work of the most important living American writer to-date, the collection will hold wide appeal to advanced readers in American studies, literary scholarship, and film.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Roth and Celebrity: An Introduction, Aimee Pozorski
Chapter 2: Paying Attention to the Man behind the Curtain: Philip Roth and the Dynamics of Written and Unwritten Celebrity, Derek Royal
Chapter 3: Philip Roth’s Lover’s Quarrel, James Bloom
Chapter 4: Philip Roth and Film, Ira Nadel
Chapter 5: Philip Roth: Death and Celebrity, Miriam Jaffe Foger
Chapter 6: “Into Thin Air”: Roth and Celebrity Selfhood, Debra Shostak
Chapter 7: Twilight of the Superheroes: Philip Roth, Celebrity, and the End of Print Culture, Matthew Shipe
Chapter 8: “And now ... the feature attraction”: Infamy, Vitality, and Performance in Sabbath’s Theater, Maggie McKinley
Chapter 9: Double Consciousness and the Jewish Heart of Darkness: The Counterlife and Operation Shylock, Brett Ashley Kaplan
Chapter 10: Dis/simulation within Metafiction: Hiding and Disguising as Literary Compulsion in the Fiction of Philip Roth, Nigel Rodenhurst
Chapter 11:. Fanfare for Agoraphobia, Mark Shechner

Roth and Celebrity is a fascinating and varied collection of essays, exploring celebrity in relation to the literature and figure of Philip Roth. This book charts the theme, the allure, and the problem of celebrity in modern American culture as subjects that captivated Roth as a writer. At the same time, it examines Roth's own celebrity—as a young, prize-winning writer in the late 1950s, as the progenitor of the scandalous novel Portnoy's Complaint circa 1969 and then, in the 1990s and beyond, as an eminent American author. Roth and Celebrity is as much a contribution to scholarship as it is an accessible, lively introduction to Roth and his fiction.