Philip Roth and the Body : Jewishness, Gender, and Race

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.