- 229 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
About This Book
The first comprehensive assessment of Philip Roth's later novels, Mocking the Age offers rich and insightful readings that explore how these extraordinary works satirize our contemporary culture. From The Ghost Writer to The Plot Against America, Roth uses humor to address deadly serious matters, including social and political issues, psychological problems, postmodern concerns, and the absurd. In her clear and extensive analyses of these works, Elaine B. Safer looks at how Roth's approach to the comic incorporates the self-deprecating humor of Jewish comedians, as well as the humor of nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewish storytellers and such twentieth-century writers as Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow. Filling the void on critical examinations of Roth's later work, Safer's book provides a thorough appraisal of Roth's lifetime accomplishment and an essential evaluation of his comic genius.
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Table of contents
- MOCKING THE AGE
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1. Introduction: âSheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousnessâ
- 2. From The Ghost Writer to The Counterlife Comic Incongruity and the Road to Postmodernism
- 3. Operation Shylock: The Double, the Comic,and the Quest for Identity
- 4. Sabbathâs Theater: Sabbathâs Fear of DeathâRaunchy? Picaresque? Heroic?
- 5. American Pastoral The Tragicomic Fall of Newarkand the House of Levov
- 6. I Married a Communist: âA Grave Misfortune Replete with Farceâ
- 7. The Human Stain: Comic Irony and the Lives of Coleman Silk
- 8. The Dying Animal: âPleasure Is Our Subjectâ
- 9. The Plot Against America: Paranoia or Possibility?
- 10.Conclusion: âThe Farcical Edge of Sufferingâ
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index