When Phillip Roth (1933-2018) passed away last year, he was almost universally honored by the literary community as an “astonishing force.” The New Yorker eulogy suggests
that he was “in competition with the best in American fiction---with Melville, Faulkner, and Bellow—but he was funnier, more spontaneous than any of them.” Some of his novels are classics—from the savage youthful exuberance of Portnoy’s Complaint, through his fertile mid-career with American Pastoral and Sabbath’s Theatre, unto his
prescient late novel—The Plot Against America that anticipates the menace of authoritarianism. With a final burst of creative energy in his late 70s, he chose the
condensed form of the novella and tackled the passage into what he described as the “massacre” of old age. In this class, we will evaluate Roth’s legacy, paying heed to
both his acolytes and his detractors. We will read four representative shorter works: Goodbye, Columbus, The Ghost Writer, Everyman, and Nemesis. We will examine his
influence on the next generation of mostly Jewish writers, such as Michael Chabon and Allegra Goodman.
The great Jewish American literary triumvirate of Bellow, Malamud, and Roth are often grouped together as
emblematic of the late 20th Century’s secular Jewish sensibility—marked by “a kind of alienation that is
enlivened and exacerbated by what binds it.” Yet, in Roth’s works, we also discover a palpable nostalgia for the mythic lost world of his Jewish childhood in Newark. For Roth, this was but one version of a quintessentially American experience. As we consider the novellas, interject some non-fictional pieces and short stories by his literary heirs, and observe some fine documentary film footage, I trust that we will arrive at an entertaining and provocative
inquiry into Phillip Roth—his life, his work, and his legacy.