[PDF] Philip Roths Portnoys Complaint eBook

Author : Philip Roth
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 29,46 MB
Release : 1994-09-20
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0679756450

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The groundbreaking novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral that originally propelled its author to literary stardom: told in a continuous monologue from patient to psychoanalyst, this masterpiece draws us into the turbulent mind of one lust-ridden young Jewish bachelor named Alexander Portnoy. "Deliciously funny...absurd and exuberant, wild and uproarious...a brilliantly vivid reading experience." —The New York Times Book Review "Touching as well as hilariously lewd.... Roth is vibrantly talented." —New York Review of Books Portnoy's Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933- )] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: 'Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient's "morality," however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.' (Spielvogel, O. "The Puzzled Penis," Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV, p. 909.) It is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship.

Author : Bernard Avishai
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 174 pages
File Size : 41,45 MB
Release : 2012-04-24
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0300178115

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The publication of Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969 provoked instant, powerful reactions. It blasted Philip Roth into international fame, subjected him to unrelenting personal scrutiny and conjecture, and shocked legions of readers—some delighted, others appalled. Portnoy and other main characters became instant archetypes, and Roth himself became a touchstone for conflicting attitudes toward sexual liberation, Jewish power, political correctness, Freudian language, and bourgeois disgust. What about this book inspired Richard Lacayo of Time to describe it as “a literary instance of shock and awe,” and the Modern Library to list it among the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century? Bernard Avishai offers a witty exploration of Roth’s satiric masterpiece, based on the prolific novelist's own writings, teaching notes, and personal interviews. In addition to discussing the book’s timing, rhetorical gambit, and sheer virtuousity, Avishai includes a chapter on the Jewish community’s outrage over the book and how Roth survived it, and another on the author’s scorching treatment of psychoanalysis. Avishai shows that Roth’s irreverent novel left us questioning who, or what, was the object of the satire. Hilariously, it proved the serious ways we construct fictions about ourselves and others.

Author : Harold Bloom
Publisher : Chelsea House
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 31,23 MB
Release : 2004-01
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN : 9780791075821

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- Presents the most important 20th century criticism on major works from The Odyssey through modern literature - The critical essays reflect a variety of schools of criticism - Contains critical biographies, notes on the contributing critics, a chronology of the author's life, and an index - Introductory essay by Harold Bloom"

Author : Philip Roth
Publisher : Random House
Page : 418 pages
File Size : 47,73 MB
Release : 2010-12-23
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1446401049

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The Ruppert Mundys, once the greatest baseball team in America, are now in a terminal decline, their line-up filled with a disreputable assortment of old men, drunks and even amputees. Around them baseball itself seems to be collapsing, brought down by a bizarre mixture of criminality, stupidity, and The Great Communist Conspiracy, aimed at the very heart of the American way of life. In this hilarious and wonderfully eccentric novel Philip Roth turns his attention to one of the most beloved of all American rituals: baseball. Players, tycoons and the paying public are all targets as Roth satirises the dense tapestry of myths and legends that have grown up around The Great American Pastime.

Author : Claudia Roth Pierpont
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
Page : 364 pages
File Size : 23,83 MB
Release : 2013-10-22
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0374710449

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A critical evaluation of Philip Roth—the first of its kind—that takes on the man, the myth, and the work Philip Roth is one of the most renowned writers of our time. From his debut, Goodbye, Columbus, which won the National Book Award in 1960, and the explosion of Portnoy's Complaint in 1969 to his haunting reimagining of Anne Frank's story in The Ghost Writer ten years later and the series of masterworks starting in the mid-eighties—The Counterlife, Patrimony, Operation Shylock, Sabbath's Theater, American Pastoral, The HumanStain—Roth has produced some of the great American literature of the modern era. And yet there has been no major critical work about him until now. Here, at last, is the story of Roth's creative life. Roth Unbound is not a biography—though it contains a wealth of previously undisclosed biographical details and unpublished material—but something ultimately more rewarding: the exploration of a great writer through his art. Claudia Roth Pierpont, a staff writer for The New Yorker, has known Roth for nearly a decade. Her carefully researched and gracefully written account is filled with remarks from Roth himself, drawn from their ongoing conversations. Here are insights and anecdotes that will change the way many readers perceive this most controversial and galvanizing writer: a young and unhappily married Roth struggling to write; a wildly successful Roth, after the uproar over Portnoy, working to help writers from Eastern Europe and to get their books known in the West; Roth responding to the early, Jewish—and the later, feminist—attacks on his work. Here are Roth's family, his inspirations, his critics, the full range of his fiction, and his friendships with such figures as Saul Bellow and John Updike. Here is Roth at work and at play. Roth Unbound is a major achievement—a highly readable story that helps us make sense of one of the most vital literary careers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Author : Jacques Berlinerblau
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 286 pages
File Size : 43,90 MB
Release : 2021-09-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 081394662X

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Let it be said, Philip Roth was never uncontroversial. From his first book, Roth scandalized literary society as he questioned Jewish identity and sexual politics in postwar America. Scrutiny and fierce rebukes of the renowned author, for everything from chauvinism to anti-Semitism, followed him his entire career. But the public discussions of race and gender and the role of personal history in fiction have deepened in the new millennium. In his latest book, Jacques Berlinerblau offers a critical new perspective on Roth’s work by exploring it in the era of autofiction, highly charged racial reckonings, and the #MeToo movement. The Philip Roth We Don’t Know poses provocative new questions about the author of Portnoy’s Complaint, The Human Stain, and the Zuckerman trilogy first by revisiting the long-running argument about Roth’s misogyny within the context of #MeToo, considering the most current perceptions of artists accused of sexual impropriety and the works they create, and so resituating the Roth debates. Berlinerblau also examines Roth’s work in the context of race, revealing how it often trafficked in stereotypes, and explores Roth’s six-decade preoccupation with unstable selves, questioning how this fictional emphasis on fractured personalities may speak to the author’s own mental state. Throughout, Berlinerblau confronts the critics of Roth —as well as his defenders, many of whom were uncritical friends of the famous author—arguing that the man taught us all to doubt "pastorals," whether in life or in our intellectual discourse.

Author : Benjamin Taylor
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 27,75 MB
Release : 2021-09-07
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0143133454

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Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award A deeply felt, beautifully crafted meditation on friendship and loss in the vein of A Year of Magical Thinking, and a touching portrait of Philip Roth from his closest friend. I had a baseball question on the tip of my tongue: What was the name of "the natural," the player shot by a stalker in a Chicago hotel room? He gave me an amused look that darkened in-to puzzlement, then fear. Then he pitched forward into the soup, unconscious. When I entered the examining room twenty minutes after our arrival at Charlotte Hungerford Hospital, Philip said, "No more books." Thus he announced his retirement. So begins Benjamin Taylor's Here We Are, the unvarnished portrait of his best friend and one of America's greatest writers. Needless to say, Philip Roth's place in the canon is secure, but what is less clear is what the man himself was like. In Here We Are, Benjamin Taylor's beautifully constructed memoir, we see him as a mortal man, experiencing the joys and sorrows of aging, reflecting on his own writing, and doing something we all love to do: passing the time in the company of his closest friend. Here We Are is an ode to friendship and its wondrous ability to brighten our lives in unexpected ways. Benjamin Taylor is one of the most talented writers working today, and this new memoir pays tribute to his friend, in the way that only a writer can. Roth encouraged him to write this book, giving Taylor explicit instructions not to sugarcoat anything and not to publish it until after his death. Unvarnished and affectionately true to life, Taylor's memoir will be the definitive account of Philip Roth as he lived for years to come.

Author : Philip Roth
Publisher : HarperCollins
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 27,76 MB
Release : 2008-09-16
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0547345305

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Against the backdrop of the Korean War, a young man faces life’s unimagined chances and terrifying consequences. It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio’s Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at the local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hard-working neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad -- mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy. As the long-suffering, desperately harassed mother tells her son, the father’s fear arises from love and pride. Perhaps, but it produces too much anger in Marcus for him to endure living with his parents any longer. He leaves them and, far from Newark, in the midwestern college, has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world. Indignation, Philip Roth’s twenty-ninth book, is a story of inexperience, foolishness, intellectual resistance, sexual discovery, courage, and error. It is a story told with all the inventive energy and wit Roth has at his command, at once a startling departure from the haunted narratives of old age and experience in his recent books and a powerful addition to his investigations of the impact of American history on the life of the vulnerable individual.