Philip Roth and the Body: Jewishness, Gender, and Race

To what extent can the leaky, porous bodies in Philip Roth’s fiction be read as symbols of resistance against anti-Semitism, white supremacy, and racism?Philip Roth and the Body questions the symbolic functionality of the corporeal in Roth’s main works of fiction, particularly as sites of gender and racial identification for Roth’s protagonists.In his recurrent employment of the abject, Roth throws into doubt the body as a coherent, stable entity, undermining his male characters’ determinations of gendered and racial otherness through his porously unstable bodies. Joshua Lander draws on the work of Zygmunt Bauman and his theory of the ‘conceptual Jew’ to argue that Roth’s fiction is yoked together by a shared interest in how anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jewish difference - centered around the body - pervasively inform American Jewish identities.The book also contends that Roth resists American white nationalism by transforming the body’s ejaculations, excretions, secretions, and expulsi