Texte remanié de: Dissertation--Universität Berlin, 2005. / Bibliogr. p. 245-266.

The Counterlife of Knight Errant Christie McKay is a novel about a man with two lives. Christie McKay is a middle-aged academic who has a self-harming partner he cannot leave. On a sabbatical studying Don Quixote he meets another woman and falls in love. However, instead of leaving his self-harming nemesis, he concocts an absurd fantasy that will allow him to lead a double life and have a relationship with both women at the same time. His attempts to compartmentalize both lives leads to tragedy as the one crashes into the other with dire consequences. The novel was partly inspired by Philip Roth’s notion of ‘the counterlife’, this being the double life that is created in order to make the official one somehow more manageable. Thus the rococo fantasies of a Billy Liar or, more commonly, the prosaic extramarital affair. The Trials of Philip Roth: Writing as Ordeal and Punishment examines the influence of a recurring trope in the writings of Philip Roth which I have called ‘The Trial’. I trace the development of this feature to a negative reaction to Roth’s early work, most notably the Goodbye Columbus collection of short stories and the novel Portnoy’s Complaint. The thesis examines the changing nature of this ‘trial’ conceit and how it is broadened and developed by Roth in the later works, especially in the so-called American Trilogy series of novels. I argue that the basic structure of the trial involves an individual, almost always a man, unjustly accused of some heinous crime by the presiding arbiters of moral taste. This individual is usually hounded and banished by their particular community. While acknowledging the complex differences between fiction and autobiography, I argue that Roth’s personal experiences of being on trial, in the earliest work for supposedly having ridiculed American suburban Jews, has helped to produce a body of work which feeds on rage and moral indignation and which repeatedly puts the individual up against a censorious community with suffocating concepts of normalcy.

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on Feb 19, 2010). The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Thesis advisor: Dr. Speer Morgan. Includes bibliographical references.

Univ., Diss.--Hamburg, 2000. / Hergestellt on demand. Literaturverz. S. 366 - 376.

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

No description available.

Techn. Univ., Habil.-Schr.--Berlin, 2005. / Bibliogr. P. Roth und Literaturverz. S. [245] - 266.

Zugl.: Heidelberg, Univ., Diss.

The last one hundred years of American literature have witnessed the development of three elemental movements: naturalism, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, represented by such authors as Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser; nihilism, predominant in the 1920's and 1930's, represented best by Ernest Hemmingway; and the post-World War II literature which will be called literature of the quest, represented by such authors as Saul Bellow, William Styron, Philip Roth, John Updike, and others. The first chapter will show briefly the historical development of these three movements in American literature, their distinctive features, and their relationship to American moral and social values. Chapters Two through Four will analyze in detail the three distinctive aspects of this emerging literary form--the literature of the quest. The last chapter will focus on one novel, Letting Go, by Philip Roth, as an example of this literature.

Cinq auteurs nous permettent d’avoir une vision plurilatérale du conflit israélo-palestinien, aussi notre travail porte-t-il sur l’étude comparative de textes de Mahmoud Darwich, d’Edward Saïd, David Grossman, Jean Genet, et Philip Roth. Pour chacun, nous avons choisi un texte qui traduit leur rapport avec ce conflit, et au-delà leur lien avec un territoire et un peuple. C’est de ce lien dont il est question : soit l’écriture reflète, chez certains auteurs, les liens familiaux, ancestraux, originaires qui lient l’écrivain à sa communauté. Soit l’écriture étend ses marges vers d’autres nouages pour trouver des « branchements » en dehors du même. Entre les deux attitudes se jouent deux conceptions du politique, deux acceptations différentes du « démos » de la démocratie ; l’acceptation ou non de l’étrangeté. Ce sont alors également deux approches différentes de la littérature. Celle-ci n’a pas forcément à perpétuer nos « représentations » mais à les questionner pour que s’ouvre un autre rapport à l’autre et à nous-même. Les représentations dominantes chez les uns et les autres, chez les Israéliens comme chez les Palestiniens, sont marqués par un fantasme de plénitude qui exclut toute approche de l'autre. Le texte littéraire, inspiré de ces jeux de miroir avec le politique, devrait défaire ce fantasme afin que l'accès à l'autre et à sa reconnaissance soit libre. / Five authors provide give us a vision of plurilateral Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Our work also focuses on the comparative study of texts of Mahmoud Darwish, Edward Saïd, David Grossman, Jean Genet, and Philip Roth. For each of them, we chose a text that reflects their relationship to this conflict, and beyond their relationship with a territory and a people. This link is in question: is the writing reflects some authors, family ties, ancestral origin that binds the writer to his community. Either writing extends its margins to other knotting to find "connections" outside the same. Between the two attitudes are two conceptions of politics, two different meanings of "demos" of democracy and acceptance or not of strangeness. It then also two different approaches to literature, it did not necessarily perpetuate our "representations" but question them in order to open another relative to each other and ourselves that is no longer conditioned by them. Against the cult of the full and full of fantasy players raging on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the literary text and the political will revise each other, so we can perhaps due recognition of otherness.