What kind of a writer was Philip Roth? Was he, first and foremost, “all-American”? A misogynist? A “self-hating Jew”? Unquestionably, he grapples in his fiction with problems of Jewish cultural difference: parochialism, assimilation, conversion, anxiety, whiteness. And yet he also wrestled powerfully with questions of social status and reputation, gendered guilt, sexual shame, and the role that literature may play in the impossible desire to fully know oneself and others. Early in his considerable career, Roth turned to psychoanalysis to tackle sex and self-knowledge, experimenting with the confessional genre and creating controversial characters like Alex Portnoy, the libidinous and guilt-wracked eponymous protagonist of Portnoy’s Complaint, whose uninterrupted monologue to his (silent) psychoanalyst harangues a reader with talk of women, semen, divorce, and racial difference. What can reading Roth now—in the wake of #MeToo, with antisemitism a term front and center in public discourse—teach us about masculinity and desire, freedom and power, realism, irony, American history, and the salience and limits of identity?
In this course, we will read the whole of Portnoy’s Complaint, alongside another early novel, My Life as a Man. In each, a young Jewish man tells the fictional psychoanalyst Otto Spielvogel what’s on his mind; but only in the latter does Roth begin to experiment formally with fiction-within-fiction and to recognize explicitly the social and political backdrop against which he penned his portraits of Jewish-American masculinity: the “bitter struggles for freedom and power” and the 1960s counterculture. Was Roth a part of this counterculture, or do his fictions reinforce a prevailing patriarchal-racist social order? Do his narrators, battling volubly with their own abjection, perform a credible self-critique? And do Roth’s formal experiments, including the assimilation of his own autobiographical material, stand the test of time? In addition to the two novels, we will read selections from the vast canon of Roth commentary, notably by Vivian Gornick, Josh Lambert, and practicing psychoanalysts.
Note:
There *is* no physical Brooklyn Institute. We hold our classes all over (thus far) Brooklyn and Manhattan, in alternative spaces ranging from the back rooms of bars to bookstores to spaces in cultural centers, including the Center for Jewish History, the Goethe-Institut, and the Barnard Center for Research on Women. We can (and do) turn any space into a classroom. You will be notified of the exact location when you register for a class.
