Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Dedication
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Many Myths of Henry Roth
- 3 Shifting Urbanscape: Roth's “Private” New York
- 4 The Classic of Disinheritance
- 5 Henry Roth in Nighttown, or, Containing Ulysses
- 6 Roth's Call It Sleep: Modernism on the Lower East Side
- 7 “A world somewhere, somewhere else.”
- Notes on Contributors
- Selected Bibliography
- Plate section
7 - “A world somewhere, somewhere else.”
Language, Nostalgic Mournfulness, and Urban Immigrant Family Romance in Call It Sleep
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Dedication
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Many Myths of Henry Roth
- 3 Shifting Urbanscape: Roth's “Private” New York
- 4 The Classic of Disinheritance
- 5 Henry Roth in Nighttown, or, Containing Ulysses
- 6 Roth's Call It Sleep: Modernism on the Lower East Side
- 7 “A world somewhere, somewhere else.”
- Notes on Contributors
- Selected Bibliography
- Plate section
Summary
Despising
For you the city, thus I turn my back;
There is a world elsewhere.
Shakespeare, Coriolanus III.iiiOnly at nightfall, aethereal rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
T. S. Eliot, The Waste LandThe solution to my difficult situation seemed to be that “world elsewhere” of Coriolanus, the world of the arts, the world of art, in which Eda Lou Walton figures so much because she gave me the opportunity to enter the world of the artist of that time, the detached artist.
Henry Roth to Mario MaterassiThe second novel … would have treated of just that theme: the youth's search for the world elsewhere: how the immigrant urchin who had lost the primacy of his ghetto haven and jettisoned faith … won another haven, a superior one, he thought, in the world of letters, in the world of art. Not to be. Shortcircuited. Aborted.
Henry Roth, “Itinerant Ithacan”I am grateful to Hana Wirth-Nesher for inviting me to write this essay, Tanya Ponton and Breda O'Keeffe for their energetic and resourceful research assistance, to Steve Love at the Hilles Library, Harvard University, to the Interlibrary Loans Office at the Zimmerman Library, University of New Mexico, to William M. Roberts at the University Archive of the University of California at Berkeley, to Thomas Berman at the University Archives of New York University, to Nancy Kandoian, Map Collections, and Stephen Crook, Henry W. […]
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- New Essays on Call It Sleep , pp. 127 - 188Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996
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