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Elaine SaferProfessor Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth (SUNY Press, 2006)Critics have said “The first comprehensive assessment of Philip Roth’s later novels, Mocking the Age offers rich and insightful readings that explore how these extraordinary works satirize our contemporary culture.” From The Ghost Writer to The Plot Against America, Roth uses humor to address deadly serious matters, including social and political issues, psychological problems, postmodern concerns, and the absurd. The book looks at how Roth’s approach to the comic incorporates the self-deprecating humor of Jewish comedians, as well as the humor of nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewish storytellers and such twentieth-century writers as Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow. Not enough has been said about Roth’s later work; this book aims to provide an appraisal of Roth’s lifetime accomplishment and an essential evaluation of his comic genius.
Reviews “Safer’s treatment is a reflection of her deep and meticulously researched involvement with Roth and her obvious desire to do justice to him. This book will stand for years to come as the definitive work on the later novels of Philip Roth.” --Daniel Walden, editor of Twentieth-Century American-Jewish Fiction Writers “Safer explores the relation of humor to theme, form, and narration in ways that are consistently intelligent, illuminating, and interesting. She draws easily and gracefully on contemporary and nineteenth-century American fiction, on the wide critical response to Roth’s work, and on other historical and philosophical texts that explain Roth’s texts and methods.” --Judith Yaross Lee, author of Defining New Yorker Humor Current Research My present study, “The Comic Imagination in Jewish American Literature,” represents a needed focus on humor in Jewish American fiction since the 1980s. This project develops from my Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth.Five contemporary Jewish American comic fictionists that I consider are: Steve Stern, whose whimsical, magical realism invests twentieth-century Jewish American communities with what seem to be East European phantoms, with their superstitions and rites and Jewish liturgy; Allegra Goodman, who displays lively and humorous glimpses of encounters between Orthodox and secular Jews; Anne Roiphe, who depicts comic vignettes on marriage and family; Thane Rosenbaum, who uses fragments from the Holocaust as materials from which to develop dark humor; Jonathan Safran Foer, who uses the comic epic novel as form for experimental, humorous fiction. Foer’s two novels employ the comic and the absurd to illuminate the ineffable: the Holocaust and the bombing of the World Trade Center, respectively. My article on Foer will be published in the Fall 2006. My research directly relates to the courses I teach in modern and postmodern American literature. I try to have students see the literature in a context of theories on the novel, humor, and postmodernism. For more information, see the English Department's faculty profile for Elaine Safer.
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