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Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth
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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Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth
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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Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth

Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth

by Elaine B. Safer
Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth
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Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth

Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth

by Elaine B. Safer

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780791481974
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Publication date: 02/01/2012
Series: SUNY series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 229
File size: 381 KB

About the Author

Elaine B. Safer is Professor of English at the University of Delaware and the author of The Contemporary American Comic Epic: The Novels of Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis, and Kesey.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: “Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness”

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. Sabbath’s Theater: Sabbath’s Fear of Death—Raunchy? Picaresque? Heroic?

5. American Pastoral: The Tragicomic Fall of Newark and the House of Levov

6. I Married a Communist: “A Grave Misfortune Replete with Farce”

7. The Human Stain: Comic Irony and the Lives of Coleman Silk

8. The Dying Animal: “Pleasure Is Our Subject”

9. The Plot Against America: Paranoia or Possibility?

10. Conclusion: “The Farcical Edge of Suffering”

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

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