🕍 ALA 2022 Presentation and Roth Panel: Thoughts

This panel, at the American Literature Association, discussed Roth's biographical legacy and how he himself imagined it might look--his fears and his hopes. My fellow panelists presented such interesting papers: Andy Connolly presented on Roth and biographical fetishism, Miriam Jaffe gave an excellent talk about Roth's library legacy, and Brittany Hirth gave an interesting insight into Roth's The Dying Animal in light of cancel culture. These presentations were all so varied and interesting considering the central topic: Roth's biographical legacy. We each took vastly different approaches to what seemed like such a specific topic, especially when it came to which novels to discuss (if any). I was surprised how little overlap there was with my presentation, as I feared many might do something similar: I presented on Operation Shylock and Joshua Ferris's less-well-known To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. The following is the abstract:

          Philip Roth was very much concerned with his public perception, so much so that his fiction often deals with themes like political fallouts (The Human Stain, as one example). In Operation Shylock, Philip Roth’s narrator, who is also Philip Roth, is impersonated by someone calling themselves by the same name. Roth’s fictional version of himself wrestles with this impostor as he attempts to maintain his reputation, much like the real Roth struggled with similar anxieties in his lifetime. After the controversy surrounding his biography and biographer, it is clear that, when returning to the novel, Roth’s fears about his future reputation are more relevant than ever. Ferris’ To Rise Again at a Decent Hour borrows Roth’s plot but shifts the setting into the 21st century where the existence of social media and the internet drastically change the ease and style of this reputation-shattering impersonation. Though Roth could never have predicted what the internet and social media could have looked like in 1993, reading Roth’s and Ferris’s novels together with the benefit of hindsight show us that Roth’s anxieties are not only still relevant in the 21st century, but that Roth’s doppelganger, that “untrue” “imposter” with all the power which he feared, may have turned out, to his dismay, to be the publication of his biography. 

After the panel, I listened to another incredible panel about Roth's work, his controversies, etc, then met with the Roth Society for a business meeting and later for dinner. It was an incredible honor to be alongside these magnificent scholars today, and to get to talk with them more about Roth, Jewish writing, identity, and more.