Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T14:00:04.829Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Jew in the Canon: Reading Race and Literary History in Philip Roth's The Human Stain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jennifer Glaser
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The evolving political landscape of a multicultural America grown disenchanted with the mythology of the melting pot had vast repercussions for the Jewish American literary imagination. Nonetheless, critical race theory has yet to take full stock of the role of Jewish writers in the debates over canonicity, representation, and multicultural literary genealogies occurring in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. Philip Roth's The Human Stain, published in 2000, directly engages questions of literary history, race, and the position of the Jewish writer and intellectual in the canon wars. By depicting the tragedy of an African American man who passes into whiteness by passing for a Jewish professor, Roth uses the trope of passing to simultaneously critique the puritan impulse he perceives at the heart of the multicultural academy and write himself into the multicultural canon taking shape at the time.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 123 , Issue 5: Special Topic Comparative Racialization , October 2008 , pp. 1465 - 1478
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by The Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Atlas, James. Bellow. New York: Modern, 2002.Google Scholar
Birkerts, Sven. “Roth, Mailer, Bellow Running Out of Gas.” New York Observer 12 Oct. 1997. 27 May 2008 <http://www.observer.com/node/39729>.Google Scholar
Brodkin, Karen. How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993.Google Scholar
Caughie, Pamela L. Passing and Pedagogy. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1999.Google Scholar
Crenshaw, Kimberle, et al., eds. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. New York: New York UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Dickstein, Morris. “The Complex Fate of the Jewish American Writer.” Nation 22 Oct. 2002. 1 Mar. 2007 <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011022/dickstein/3>.Google Scholar
Furman, Andrew. Contemporary Jewish Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2001.Google Scholar
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. “The Passing of Anatole Broyard.” Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man. New York: Random, 1997. 180–214.Google Scholar
Greenlee, Sam. The Spook Who Sat by the Door. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Griffin, John Howard. Black like Me. New York: Signet, 1991.Google Scholar
Harrison-Kahan, Lori. “Passing for White, Passing for Jewish.” MELUS 30.1 (2005): 19–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Itzkovitz, Daniel. “Passing like Me: Jewish Chameleonism and the Politics of Race.” South Atlantic Quarterly 98 (1999): 35–57.Google Scholar
Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Johnson, James Weldon. Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. New York: Penguin, 1990.Google Scholar
Kolb, Harold. “Defining the Canon.” Redefining American Literary History. Ed. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, A. and Ward, Jerry W. Jr. New York: MLA, 1990. 35–51.Google Scholar
Larsen, Nella. Passing. New York: Penguin, 2003.Google Scholar
Liu, Eric. The Accidental Asian. New York: Vintage, 1999.Google Scholar
Max, D. T. “The Twilight of the Old Goats.” Salon May 1997. 28 Apr. 2008 <http://www.salon.com/may97/goats970516.html>..>Google Scholar
McGrath, Charles. “Zuckerman's Alter Brain: An Interview with Philip Roth.” New York Times 7 May 2000. 27 May 2008 <http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/05/07/reviews/000507.07mcgrat.html>.Google Scholar
Posnock, Ross. Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Rogin, Michael. Black Face, White Noise. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996.Google Scholar
Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. New York: Houghton, 1997.Google Scholar
Roth, Philip. Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories. New York: Meridian, 1960.Google Scholar
Roth, Philip. The Human Stain. New York: Houghton, 2000.Google Scholar
Roth, Philip. “Writing about Jews.” Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer. Ed. Derek, Rubin. New York: Schocken, 2005. 42–63.Google Scholar
Rottenberg, Catherine. “Passing: Race, Identification, and Desire.” Criticism 45 (2003): 435–52.Google Scholar
Siegel, Fred. “The Cult of Multiculturalism.” New Republic 18 Feb. 1991: 34–40.Google Scholar
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Sollors, Werner. Neither Black nor White yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Sundquist, Eric. Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America. New York: Belknap, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tyler, Carole-Anne. “Passing: Narcissism, Identity, and Difference.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6.2–3 (1994): 212–48.Google Scholar