Roth Time

Sculptor, poet, diarist, graphic designer, pioneer artist's book maker, performer, publisher, musician, and, most of all, provocateur, Dieter Roth has long been beloved as an artist's artist. Known for his mistrust of all art institutions and commercial galleries--he once referred to museums as funeral homes--he was also known for his generosity to friends, his collaborative spirit, and for including his family in his art making. Much to the frustration of any gallery that tried to exhibit his work (supposedly none more than once), Roth thumbed his nose at those who valued high purpose and permanence in art. Constantly trying to undo his art education, he would set up systems that discouraged the conventional and the consistent: he drew with both hands at once, preserved the discarded, and reveled in the transitory. Grease stains, mold formations, insect borings, and rotting foodstuffs were just some of the materials used, both out of a fascination with their painterly, textural aspects and for their innate ability to make time visible and play to chance. "More is better," he once said, and more there always was. Roth never stopped working, and he believed that everything could be art, from his sketch pad to the table he sat at, the telephone he talked on, or his friend's kitchen (the kitchen was later sold to a museum). Roth Time: A Dieter Roth Retrospective is published to mark the first major survey exhibition of the artist's work since his death in 1998. Five decades of drawings, graphics, books, paintings, objects, installations, films and video works are represented. The publication offers a window into Roth's creative world, reflecting him and his era. The exhibition is organized by the Schaulager with The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Set in a close-knit Newark neighborhood during a terrifying polio outbreak in 1944, a “book [that] has the elegance of a fable and the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama” (The New Yorker)—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral. Bucky Cantor is a vigorous, dutiful twenty-three-year-old playground director during the summer of 1944. A javelin thrower and weightlifter, he is disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. As the devastating disease begins to ravage Bucky’s playground, Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: fear, panic, anger, bewilderment, suffering, and pain. Moving between the streets of Newark and a pristine summer camp high in the Poconos, Nemesis tenderly and startlingly depicts Cantor’s passage into personal disaster, the condition of childhood, and the painful effect that the wartime polio epidemic has on a closely-knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children.

The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth provides a comprehensive, must-have survey of interdisciplinary scholarship on one of the major American novelists of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth presents state-of-the-art scholarship on new research methods, current debates, and future directions in Philip Roth studies. It illuminates how Roth, one of the most influential American writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, not only reflected American history and culture in his important novels but uncannily anticipated our American future. Divided into six main sections, this Handbook considers such topics: - The full range of Roth's writing, from his novels and short stories to essays and life writing - Major interdisciplinary scholarly perspectives across literary studies, politics, gender studies, critical race theory, and ecocriticism - Roth's literary legacy across contemporary fiction, Jewish literature, the arts, and culture studies - Key contexts including American political movements since the 1950s, the American Jewish experience, and intertextual relationships Uniting scholars and artists who have built the field of Philip Roth studies from the ground up along with emergent scholars from around the world, this Handbook includes chapter summaries, study questions, and an author biography and timeline that includes key dates in Roth's life and publication history. It also contains a bibliography of secondary sources for further reading as well as an overview of film and television adaptations.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

“I don’t want you to rehabilitate me,” Philip Roth said to his only authorized biographer, Blake Bailey. “Just make me interesting.” Granted complete independence and access, Bailey spent almost ten years poring over Roth’s personal archive, interviewing his friends, lovers, and colleagues, and listening to Roth’s own breathtakingly candid confessions. Cynthia Ozick, in her front-page rave for the New York Times Book Review, described Bailey’s monumental biography as “a narrative masterwork … As in a novel, what is seen at first to be casual chance is revealed at last to be a steady and powerfully demanding drive. … under Bailey’s strong light what remains on the page is one writer’s life as it was lived, and―almost―as it was felt." Though Roth is generally considered an autobiographical novelist—his alter-egos include not only the Roth-like writer Nathan Zuckerman, but also a recurring character named Philip Roth—relatively little is known about the actual life on which so vast an oeuvre was supposedly based. Bailey reveals a man who, by design, led a highly compartmentalized life: a tireless champion of dissident writers behind the Iron Curtain on the one hand, Roth was also the Mickey Sabbath-like roué who pursued scandalous love affairs and aspired “[t]o affront and affront and affront till there was no one on earth unaffronted"—the man who was pilloried by his second wife, the actress Claire Bloom, in her 1996 memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House. Towering above it all was Roth’s achievement: thirty-one books that give us “the truest picture we have of the way we live now,” as the poet Mark Strand put it in his remarks for Roth’s Gold Medal at the 2001 American Academy of Arts and Letters ceremonial. Tracing Roth’s path from realism to farce to metafiction to the tragic masterpieces of the American Trilogy, Bailey explores Roth’s engagement with nearly every aspect of postwar American culture.

Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995-2010) moves beyond a critical reception of Philip Roth's recent fiction that has focused primarily on an interest in post WWII America. By contrast, Aimee Pozorski argues that these novels grapple more comprehensively with US history in their fascination with America's "traumatic beginnings" and the legacy of the American Revolution. Drawing on close readings and trauma theory, Roth and Trauma reveals the problem of history in Roth's later works to be the unexpected and repeated appearance of historical trauma that links the still-unfinished American dream with the nightmarish quality of our recent history.

In a style richly accessible to the general reader, this book presents Roth's secular Jewishness, with its own mysteries and humor, as most representative of the American Jewish experience. Thirty years into his career as a writer, Philip Roth remains known to most readers as a self-hating Jew or a flawed would-be comic. Philip Roth and the Jews shows Roth the ironist, the master of absurdity, for whom twentieth-century America and modern Jewish history resonate with each other's signal accomplishments and anxieties. Roth's "egoism" is a persona, an abashed moralist discomfited by the world. Cooper shows that in the "Jewish" works Roth has taken the pulse of America and read the pressures of the world. Modernism, the universal tug for individual sovereignty and against tribal definition, is an issue everywhere. Roth's own odyssey of betrayal, loss, and return—the pattern of the Jewish writer in the last 200 years—is so shaped by his origins that Roth has carried his home and neighborhood into the corners of the earth and thus never left them.

Samuel Roth is known to most literary scholars as a bold literary "pirate" for issuing unauthorized editions of modernist sensations, including Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In the absence of an international copyright agreement and because works deemed obscene could not be copyrighted, what he did was not illegal. But it did violate the protocols of mutual fair dealing between publishers and authors. Those publications provoked an unprecedented international protest of writers, publishers, and intellectuals, who eventually vilified Roth on two continents. Roth was a man with an uncanny ability to recognize good contemporary writing and make it accessible to popular audiences. Ultimately, his dedication to the publication of these works broke down many of the censorship laws of the time, though he suffered greatly for his efforts. His story portrays a struggle with literary censorship in the mid-twentieth century while providing insights into how modernism was marketed in America.