📚 Roth@90 Presentation: Thoughts

My paper, titled "Portnoy’s Constraints: Reading Resistance in Roth’s Novel as Identity Formation in the 2020s" was presented at the Roth@90 conference in March of 2023. The following is the abstract:

       Philip Roth, in an interview with Tina Brown, remarked that he could never imagine revisiting Portnoy’s Complaint in his advanced age, calling it “a youthful indiscretion.” It seems that scholars are less interested in revisiting it as well: while many have written on Portnoy’s Complaint since its release, as it caused waves in both the Jewish and overall literary communities, few scholars have examined the novel in light of Roth’s biographical controversy, and even just generally in the context of the early 2020s (especially the pandemic, among other large-scale cultural events). In this essay, I will propose a reading of Roth’s novel that considers both his concerns about, and scandal surrounding, the publication of his biography—including how the novel might hint toward his concerns about his identity as a writer and public figure—and rethink the way the novel might be read now with those fears in mind. Though an aged Roth may consider the text a “youthful indiscretion,” it seems more apt to call it a “youthful plea;” a plea to take one’s anxieties about who one is and one’s place in the world seriously, a message that seems ripe for re-examination in a post-biography (for Roth), and post-2020 (for the rest of us), world. 

The conference was phenomenal: I enjoyed so many presentations, particularly my good friend Quinn Moyer's presentation on the challenges of teaching Portnoy's Complaint in a modern classroom. Other interesting panels featuring Ira Nadel and key notes featuring Elisa Albert were standouts.