PASSING AS A RESULT OF CULTURAL TRAUMA IN P. ROTH’S HUMAN STAIN
Abstract
The actions of a Republican-dominated Congress that sought to impeach President Clinton and the political correctness frenzy of the 1990s provide both setting and theme for The Human Stain (2000), the last novel in Roth’s social history trilogy. The novel takes place in 1998, the year the president was impeached. The Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal is the analogue for the virtual “arraignment” of classics professor Coleman Silk. Silk enrages his politically correct colleagues because he unwittingly uses the racial slur spooks, when he comments ironically on the ghostly nature of two students who have enrolled but never have attended class.
Keywords
Passing, cultural trauma, racism, political correctness.
References
- Patrice D. Rankine (2005) Passing as Tragedy: Philip Roth's The Human Stain, the Oedipus Myth, and the Self-Made Man, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 47:1, 101-112, DOI: 10.3200/CRIT.47.1.101-112
- Tim Parrish, BECOMING BLACK: ZUCKERMAN'S BIFURCATIN SELF IN THE HUMAN STAIN, p 211
- Roth, Philip. The Counterlife. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986.p210
- Sanford Pinsker, ‘‘Jewish-American Literature’s Lost-and-Found Depart ment: How Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick Reimagine Their Significant Dead,’’ Modern Fiction Studies 35, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 225.
- Philip Roth, ‘‘‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka,’’ Reading Myself and Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 256.
- Anatole Broyard, Kafka was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (New York: Carol Southern Books, 1990), 69
- Safer, Elaine B. Mocking the age : the later novels of Philip Roth, State University of New York Press, Albany 2006. P117
- McGrath, Charles. "Zuckerman's Alter Brain." New York Times Book Review 7 May 2000:
- Mitchell Cohen, ‘‘In Defense of Shaatnez: A Politics for Jews in a Multicultural America,’’ in Insider/Out sider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, ed. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susan Heschel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), p 48
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