In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Introduction
  • Dean Franco (bio)

The roundtable was organized to begin a discussion of teaching Philip Roth’s fiction, beginning with the question, how is his work relevant to our twenty-first century, digitally mediated, economically frightened, religiously fractious, post-pornographic students? Given how local-seeming and time-specific (and often age-centered) Roth’s fiction is, how do we introduce his work to students whose frames of reference are nothing like, say, Mickey Sabbath’s, or even the young Nathan Zuckerman’s? Though the easy answer would be to bypass the ethnic and religious specificity and get to the heart of the matter—whatever we think that is—teachers of Roth’s work know that all the drama, irony, humor, and confounding investigations of our being human in the world are in fact part and parcel of that specificity. To add to the quandary, Roth himself has expressed distaste for academic approaches to literature instruction, along with attempts to pigeonhole him or any other writer according to some identity category.

Though it would be nearly impossible and certainly undesirable to dismiss religion, ethnicity, and gender when teaching Roth, it is also irresponsible to reduce the work to categories of difference that the author himself finds uninteresting, especially when such an “issue”-based approach seems distant from the lives of our students.

Roundtable participants were asked to consider three interrelated questions: (1) How is Roth relevant to our twenty-first century students? (2) How do we teach Roth’s work while avoiding the pitfalls of reduction, allegorization, or the too-easy assignment of “ethnicity” to the literature? (3) What other literature (or philosophy or theory) do we assign to be in conversation with Roth’s work, and to advance a humanistic understanding of the world around?

And in planning for the roundtable, we ended up emphasizing the defamiliarizing and discomfiting aspects of Roth’s fiction: how it offends, how it aligns (often surprisingly) with contemporary non-Jewish immigrant and ethnic experiences, and how it defamiliarizes the otherwise safe space of the classroom, and not only for the students. [End Page 196]

Dean Franco
Wake Forest University
Dean Franco

Dean Franco is an associate professor of English at Wake Forest University and author of Ethnic American Literature: Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African American Writing and Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literature Since 1969. He is currently writing a book on critical cartographies and the geography of recognition.

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