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The Jew in the Canon: Reading Race and Literary History in Philip Roth's The Human Stain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jennifer Glaser
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Abstract

The evolving political landscape of a multicultural America grown disenchanted with the mythology of the melting pot had vast repercussions for the Jewish American literary imagination. Nonetheless, critical race theory has yet to take full stock of the role of Jewish writers in the debates over canonicity, representation, and multicultural literary genealogies occurring in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. Philip Roth's The Human Stain, published in 2000, directly engages questions of literary history, race, and the position of the Jewish writer and intellectual in the canon wars. By depicting the tragedy of an African American man who passes into whiteness by passing for a Jewish professor, Roth uses the trope of passing to simultaneously critique the puritan impulse he perceives at the heart of the multicultural academy and write himself into the multicultural canon taking shape at the time.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 123 , Issue 5: Special Topic Comparative Racialization , October 2008 , pp. 1465 - 1478
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by The Modern Language Association of America

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