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Zuckerman/Roth: Literary Celebrity between Two Deaths

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Loren Glass
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Abstract

Philip Roth invented Nathan Zuckerman to manage the temporal dissonance between the gradual and frequently posthumous canonization associated with Roth's modernist forebears and the instantaneous and contemporaneous celebrity characterizing his own postmodern career. After the mass cultural renown precipitated by Portnoy's Complaint and the devastating attack on that text by Irving Howe, Roth decided to re-create his career on the model of his literary forebears—James, Flaubert, Proust, Malamud, Mann, and especially Kafka, who died young after having published little. The first Zuckerman trilogy and its epilogue absorb the charismatic powers of these ancestors, after which Roth kills his avatar in The Counterlife, catapulting him into a pseudo-posthumous Jamesian major phase. The entire Zuckerman cycle, then, is a unique but also historically symptomatic strategy for dealing with the problem of celebrity authorship under a postmodern dispensation.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 129 , Issue 2 , March 2014 , pp. 223 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2014

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