Reading Philip Roth's American Pastoral - Couverture souple

9782810701605: Reading Philip Roth's American Pastoral

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 2810701601 ISBN 13 : 9782810701605

Editeur : Presses universitaires du Mirail, 2011

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Introduction

In his 2004 interview for the French magazine Le Monde 2, Philip Roth explains that American Pastoral (1997), his twenty-second book, is in fact quite an old project. Roth began to compose the novel during the Vietnam War. He had formulated the concept and invented the family, the rebellious daughter, and the bombing, but he still couldn't write the book. He was blocked, he claimed, because it was the daughter rather than the father who seemed to him the suffering character ("Interview with Savigneau" 24). As time passed, the abandoned project became a novel which recounts the life of an ordinary American Jew-Seymour Levov, whose peaceful post World War II version of paradise is destroyed by a powerful foe-his daughter Merry, who becomes a militant radical during the 1960s.

If, in the Vietnam years, Roth couldn't go any further with his book manuscript, the 1990s marked a new stage in his career. Indeed, American Pastoral represents Roth's creative response to the novel that preceded it, the subversive Sabbath's Theater (1995). In his 1999 interview with Alain Finkielkraut, Roth recognizes the liberty he felt with his Dionysian Sabbath. Like "Dostoevsky who fell in love with Raskolnikov, or Genet with himself," Roth also "fell in love with" Sabbath because it is through this fictional character that he found "the freedom to imagine beyond ail conventions" ("Interview Finkielkraut" 118-119). After Sabbath, it was possible again to address a more kindly conventional character. This time Roth focuses his attention on the victim. Not less than ten years after The Counterlife (1986) where he categorically rejects the pastoral as literary genre, the narrator Nathan Zuckerman returns to it, now as an observer of another man's idyllic scenario of "a sanitized, confusionless life" (Counterlife 326). As such, the self-reflexive Counterlife, the subversive Sabbath's Theater, and the ironically titled American Pastoral represent Roth's questioning of the pastoral theme in a series of counter-texts.

Today, Philip Roth is one of the world's most prolific and most decorated writers. In May 2011, he was the winner of the fourth Man Booker International Prize, the newest jewel in his crown of literary awards. Reprinted in the prestigious "Library of America" series, his fiction is incorporated into the American literary canon. However, his constant revisiting of the same themes and the same material, the use of the same narrator-Nathan Zuckerman-have incurred the critics' wrath. Roth has often been accused of repeating himself. The essays assembled in this book, however, counter this view by reconsidering Roth's writing method as a career-long exploration of situations he regards as foundational for capturing and shaping American reality.

One of these situations is the whole complex issue of pastoral longing. In an interview with Pierre Assouline, Roth discusses the notion of the pastoral as "everyman's dream, a dream for a rewarding and peaceful life of accomplishment. A bucolic existence of calm, order, optimism and success" ("Interview Assouline"). The desire of Roth's protagonist for happiness and harmony without antagonisme takes its origin in an idyllic dream. The titles of the novel's sections evoke the Bible, but the pastoral dream may have a much broader existential meaning. Milan Kundera, whom Philip Roth introduced to American audiences with the Penguin book series "Writers from the Other Europe," offers the following definition for this dream : "Behind ail the European faiths, religious and political, we find the first chapter of Genesis, which tells us that the world was created properly, that human existence is good, and that we are therefore entitled to multiply. Let us call this basic faith a categorical agreement with being" (248 ; emphasis in original).

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Pr�sentation de l'�diteur :

Dans l'ambitieux roman de Philip Roth - acclam� par la critique d�s sa parution en 1997 -, les destins individuels se m�lent � la trame du destin national des �tats-Unis. Au fil de l'histoire de la famille Levov qui se d�ploie de 1945 aux ann�es 1970 - celles de la guerre du Vietnam et du Watergate -, Roth interroge les utopies individuelles et collectives, et d�voile la nudit� de l'�tre humain face � l'�v�nement historique. Cette �pastorale am�ricaine� s'av�re en effet bien fragile : bulle pr�te � �clater, illusion patriotique min�e par la violence et le doute-

Fruit du dialogue f�cond engag� au sein d'une �quipe internationale de chercheurs, le pr�sent ouvrage propose de nombreuses pistes d'analyse pour aborder une oeuvre qui figure parmi les meilleurs romans am�ricains du XXe si�cle. Il fournira de pr�cieuses cl�s de compr�hension aux candidats � l'agr�gation d'anglais et, plus largement, aux �tudiants anglicistes de tous niveaux. Au-del�, ce livre s'adresse � tous les passionn�s de litt�rature contemporaine d�sireux d'appr�hender la complexit� de Pastorale am�ricaine.

Sous la direction de Jean-Pierre Albert Jean-Luc Nardone Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud

Velichka D. Ivanova, docteur de l'universit� Paris III, membre du groupe de recherche �Configurations litt�raires� de l'universit� de Strasbourg et membre de la soci�t� Philip Roth, a dirig� cet ouvrage qui rassemble les contributions d'une �quipe internationale de sp�cialistes : Philip Abbott, Ann Basu, David Brauner, Matthew McKenzie Davis, Erica D. Galioto, Velichka D. Ivanova, Judith Johnsey, Gary Johnson, Till Kinzel, Pia Masiero, Matthew McBride, Aim�e L Pozorski, Jessica G. Rabin, Ben Railton, David Rampton, Derek Parker Royal, Gustavo S�nchez-Canales, Debra Shostak, Linda S. Watts, Hana Wirth-Nesher.

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