The following is the proposal that was accepted for the forthcoming edited collection on Philip Roth and Empathy. More info concerning the press and release date will be coming soon. 

     Philip Roth is a writer who is steeped in baggage and controversy; we might be used to thinking of him in this way now, but whether he was at the height of his success or the beginning of his career, his work was always under fire. Portnoy’s Complaint, for example, published in 1969, angered readers due to its complicated subject matter: sexuality and Jews. Dara Horn, in her piece written upon Roth’s death, argued that “one could generously say that jokes” like the many in Portnoy’s Complaint that make fun of the various female characters “haven’t aged well, yet they were just as cruel in 1969—and the misogyny isn’t really the problem. After all, if one policed literature for bigotry, there would be little left to read. The problem is literary: these caricatures reveal a lack of not only empathy, but curiosity” (Horn). In this essay, I wish to push back on the claim that Roth’s novel lacks empathy, and explore just how empathetic it really is. In doing so, I will also try to piece together why, both then and now, readers are insistent that there is little to no empathy to be found in its pages. 

The following is the proposal that was accepted for the forthcoming edited collection on Philip Roth film adaptation. More info concerning the press and release date will be coming soon. 

     Both starring Richard Benjamin, Goodbye, Columbus (1969) and Portnoy’s Complaint (1972) received vastly different reactions from critics. Columbus was well-reviewed, receiving an Oscar nomination and winning other awards despite its messy and human portrayal of postwar Jewish characters, while Portnoy was critically panned. Most notably, Roger Ebert called the film a “true fiasco” and claimed that “the movie has no heart and little apparent sympathy with its Jewish characters” (Ebert), a similar reaction some had to the novel just a few years before. When Roth was pressed about this issue, he explained that he wanted to portray Jews as capable of everything—both good and “repellent” (his word) acts. Some readers called for a “better” representation of Jews, but Roth insisted on his portrayals, as they were honest. In this paper, I examine both films to determine what went wrong adapting Portnoy for the big screen and why the reception for Columbus was so positive. Taken together, the reception of these films sheds important light on cultural shifts from the late fifties to the early seventies and make us reconsider what works, and what doesn’t, in Roth’s portrayals of his Jewish characters both on the page and on the screen. 

The following is the proposal that was accepted for the forthcoming edited collection on laughter in war. More info concerning the press and release date will be coming soon. 

     Richard Brody, in his New Yorker article, argues that the satire in Taika Waititi’s JoJo Rabbit backfires. This common negative criticism involves a central confusion about the film’s purpose. While the goal, according to Waititi, is that it attempts to highlight the humanity of Jews and ridicule the absurdity of the Nazi regime, some have, somehow, read the opposite: that the film is trying to have us empathize with Nazis and, in turn, laugh at Jews. In this essay, I will discuss the trajectory of Hitler satire in film spanning the decades between Brooks’ mockery of Hitler The Producers in the '60s and Waititi’s 2019 film, highlighting the way filmmakers have tried to situate Hitler as an absurd figure to laugh at rather than fear. My focus will be primarily on the still-mostly-lost 1990 sitcom Heil Honey, I’m Home! featuring Hitler and Eva Braun as next-door neighbors to a Jewish couple that was cancelled immediately after the pilot aired. It prefigures Waititi’s Hitler in ways that have not yet been explored, and reworks Brooks’ style, serving as a bridge between these vastly different eras. In the end, I hope to show that there is in fact a multitude of reasons why we need to examine Hitler still, to laugh at the absurdity while condemning the hate, to remember that though long dead, his ideologies still pose a threat in today’s world and laughter and satire, however messy it may be, might help us survive it.

The following is the proposal that was accepted for the forthcoming edited collection The New Polemic: Cinematic Rhetoric from Get Out to “Barbenheimer.”

     Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) ends with Black protagonist Chris killing his white captors, the Armitage family, and escaping with his friend Rod in his TSA car. At first, he believes it is a cop car; his expression shifts to sadness, uncertainty and fear. When Rod opens the door to reveal “TSA” on the door, all tension dissipates—Chris is safe. This was not Peele’s initial vision; originally, Chris did go to prison. Peele claims he changed the ending because nation-wide protests began making the news and the Black Lives Matter movement was on the rise, marking an increase in awareness of social justice. He believed that the world was changing and offered an ending that reflected that change. This is fascinating, though, because the film now rejects the novel it draws its themes from—Native Son. 

     Chris, a renewed Bigger Thomas, becomes entangled with a white family which ends with him committing the very acts that society assumed he would; Rose smiles as Chris strangles her, as if proving he is a monster, echoing Bigger’s trial which sought to answer the question: are people what society tells them they are, or what they choose to be? While Wright leaves Bigger on his way to death row, Peele decided against this nearly eighty years later because he felt the world was truly different, or at the very least, on the verge of being different. In this chapter, I will look to Get Out as a reimagining of (and a shift away from) Native Son, and also discuss how Rashid Johnson’s 2019 adaptation of Native Son seeks to blend both perspectives, resulting in a bleaker outlook that asks whether the change Peele sees is imminent or as distant as Wright believed it to be. In the end, I aim to show that, though ever hopeful, Peele’s decision marks a trend of Black stories looking toward the future, a new futurity, rather than lamenting the past. 

The following is the proposal that was accepted for the forthcoming edited collection Superheroes and Disability on Screen: Intersectional Perspectives on Super-Bodies and Super-Identities as Politicized Spaces.

     Rocket Raccoon—a creature who has been “torn apart, and put back together, over and over and turned into some little monster” (Guardians of the Galaxy 0:54:00) and feels the weight of that every day—is a beloved antihero that takes center stage in the latter phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU) Infinity Saga. A fan-favorite, to be sure; but he has a quirk that has led to some discussion of disability in the MCU: his obsession with tricking people out of their mechanical body parts. This becomes a running joke in the series, as he even whispers to himself, after meeting Bucky Barnes who has had his arm replaced with a mechanical one: “Oh, I’ll get that arm” (Infinity War 1:53:00). This running joke has gotten a lot of flak, as has much of the MCU’s treatment of disabilities. But, the MCU has made great strides toward proper representation, and in this essay, I hope to dig a little deeper and explore some of these perceived flaws, for we might find something more interesting and thought-provoking beneath the surface. That thought-provoking something varies film to film, but ultimately, I argue that our most flawed characters, Rocket included, often deflect and project when they feel their insecurities, and some (though not all) of these seemingly misguided portrayals of disability stem not from malice, but an attempt to showcase these flaws in our heroes. To do so, I will explore key disability studies terminology, such as the “supercrip.” In addition, I will be looking mainly at four heroes, their struggle to navigate their disabilities and their various trauma, and the problems, flaws, and even beauty, at the heart of it.

The following is an excerpt from my in press article "'This too will pass:' Recovering Perfection and Discovering Connection in Cynthia Ozick's The Puttermesser Papers" in The Kentucky Philological Review, set to be published early this year. This article, based on a presentation given at the KPA conference in 2023, examines Cynthia Ozick's The Puttermesser Papers and seeks to highlight some important, often missed themes, that bridge gaps in the novel that other scholars mark as reasons it fails to feel cohesive. Below is a short excerpt:

     Since The Puttermesser Papers’ release, scholars and critics have failed to treat it as a “novel;” most focus on one or two of the chapters, rather than dealing with it as a whole. This is problematic for many reasons, but most importantly is that qualms with the novel’s form hinge on the claim that the chapters are not interconnected, that there is no overarching theme, no character journey for Puttermesser. This does a disservice to Ozick’s vision and critique of Puttermesser (a Jew facing the modern world) longing for the recovery of some sort of lost, perfect, idyllic connection. She creates a golem child so that she may recover Paradise on Earth, invents an imaginary Uncle so she might recover some lost connection to her Jewish heritage, and more, all in the name of recovery and connection. In this presentation, I will offer a reading of the novel, not just its chapters, arguing that it is coherent and has a central purpose; that being Puttermesser’s longing for the recovery of, and her “demand” of, perfect connections with the past, people, and places, and further, how Ozick believes this is representative of, and even potentially dangerous to, Jewish culture.