Overview

To what extent can the leaky, porous bodies in Philip Roth’s fiction be read as symbols of resistance against anti-Semitism, white supremacy, and racism? Philip Roth and the Body questions the symbolic functionality of the corporeal in Roth’s main works of fiction, particularly as sites of gender and racial identification for Roth’s protagonists. In his recurrent employment of the abject, Roth throws into doubt the body as a coherent, stable entity, undermining his male characters’ determinations of gendered and racial otherness through his porously unstable bodies. Joshua Lander draws on the work of Zygmunt Bauman and his theory of the ‘conceptual Jew’ to argue that Roth’s fiction is yoked together by a shared interest in how anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jewish difference – centered around the body – pervasively inform American Jewish identities. The book also contends that Roth resists American white nationalism by transforming the body’s ejaculations, excretions, secretions, and expulsions into symbols of difference that he repeatedly ties to Jewishness. At the same time, this study highlights how Roth's novels, through his focus on Jewish men, risk the reification of America’s sexist social structures as they intersect with the very racism Roth seeks to undermine. Philip Roth and the Body’s examination of how bodies in Roth’s fiction are entities troubled within his prose renews conversations about whose bodies matter, both in Roth studies and in the context of America’s racial and social politics.

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Like preeminent philosopher Judith Butler, Joshua Lander argues in Philip Roth and the Body that bodies indeed matter. By attentively reading Roth’s complicated and vexed bodies in particular, Lander’s work shows how reading Roth with an eye toward embodiment elicits a deeper sense of humanity. Complicating current debates about Roth’s representations of gender, Jewishness, and racial difference, Philip Roth and the Body understands Roth’s corpus (itself an impressive body of work committed to redefining the work of the body) as fundamentally ethical in the ways it destabilizes and resists the fascist logic of white supremacy, and, in so doing, calls into question our own relationships with bodies that matter. * Aimee Pozorski, Professor of English, Central Connecticut State University, USA, and former co-executive editor of Philip Roth Studies *

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Joshua Lander obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Glasgow in 2019, where his research focused on the novels of Philip Roth and the Jewish body. He currently works as a secondary school teacher for Edinburgh city council, researching Holocaust pedagogies and British Jewish literary responses to the Holocaust.

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