Roth and Celebrity

Fully researched and highly readable, Roth and Celebrity gathers a host of first-class Roth scholars to explore the issue of celebrity both in Roth’s life and works, in its many faceted aspects — public, private, fictional, self-reflective, invented, distorted. The book fills in a scholarly gap offering fresh readings of Roth’s books on the backdrop of an all-American fascinating and ever-present theme.

In lively and informative essays, Roth and Celebrity thoughtfully explores the public and private personae of Philip Roth. In this collection, Aimee Pozorski has gathered together a striking variety of diverse voices and approaches to Roth’s fiction that, taken together, illuminate the extraordinary range of the imagination. The focus on literary celebrity as a kind of fantasy in Roth’s fiction captures the spectacle of the public and private self– its anxieties, impersonations, and counterlives– and, in doing so, situates Roth’s remarkable career within the scope of American and Jewish writing.

Roth and Celebrity is a fascinating and varied collection of essays, exploring celebrity in relation to the literature and figure of Philip Roth. This book charts the theme, the allure, and the problem of celebrity in modern American culture as subjects that captivated Roth as a writer. At the same time, it examines Roth’s own celebrity–as a young, prize-winning writer in the late 1950s, as the progenitor of the scandalous novel Portnoy’s Complaint circa 1969 and then, in the 1990s and beyond, as an eminent American author. Roth and Celebrity is as much a contribution to scholarship as it is an accessible, lively introduction to Roth and his fiction.

This collection explores Philip Roth’s work through the lens of celebrity studies. The field, a recent development in cultural studies, has particular relevance for Roth, who has appeared to struggle with issues of notoriety, celebrity, and privacy since the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969. Pozorski (Central Connecticut State Univ.) is the author of Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1955-2010) (2011) and the current president of the Philip Roth Society. Several of the essays she includes here provide nuanced analyses of the ways in which the biographical and the fictional appear to coalesce in and complicate Roth’s work. Of particular value are Debra Shostak’s essay on the trope of celebrity and the erasure of the private self; Matthew Shipe’s analysis of works neglected by scholars, especially The Breast (1972); Maggie McKinley’s exploration of celebrity and performance in Sabbath’s Theater; and Brett Ashley Kaplan’s expansive look at the way that the trope of the double, refracted through celebrity, functions in Roth’s The Counterlife (1986) and Operation Shylock (1993). Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.