|
|
Article: Secrecy and self-invention: Philip Roth's postmodern identity in The Human Stain.
- Article from:
- International Fiction Review
- Article date:
- January 1, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 International Fiction Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000), a fitting final part of the novelist's recent trilogy comprising American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998), dramatizes powerfully the interplay of secrecy and self-transformation that determines human identity. Identity in its varied performative guises had always been a central problematic in Roth's fiction. For a novelist whose works register forcefully the solidity and specificity of the identifiable material world, a characteristic Roth shares with most nineteenth-century realist writers, the deconstructive turn of the narrative in this novel, which calls into question the essentialist notions of self, class, and ...
Related newspaper, magazine, and journal articles:
|