Title: A New Fable for Critics: Philip Roth's The Breast
Abstract:In his novella, The Breast, ' Philip Roth—as his wont—has set off a critical controversy which has little or nothing to do with the deep intention or total effect of the work. In an article entitled S...In his novella, The Breast, ' Philip Roth—as his wont—has set off a critical controversy which has little or nothing to do with the deep intention or total effect of the work. In an article entitled Sublime to Sickening—Roth, of course, the sickening half—Geoffrey Wagner castigates the Peck's Bad Boy of contemporary fiction: has a genius for making everything potentially beautiful and joyful filthy and disgusting. . . . Roth writes dirty books, pornography. Furthermore, Wagner denies Roth any and all aesthetic motivation, ascribing his commercial success rather to greed. The story, he claims, is perfectly pointless, except as a quick way of making a large sum of bread: which it resoundingly has. In an article entitled Enemies, Foreigners, and Friends, Roger Sale expresses puritanical outrage at the sexual excesses of the Robbe-Grillet in his Project for a Revolution in New York and Roth in The Breast. With no pretense at critical objectivity, he dismisses Robbe-Grillet's Project . . . as not an easy book to forgive, and Roth's The Breast as just stupefyingly bad. Working himself up into an emotional frenzy, he avers that I can only feel, reading Robbe-Grillet's and Roth's latest efforts, that these people are my enemies, that their very facility with words, which all that lifts these books above the level of the simplest pornography, what makes them hateful.Read More
Publication Year: 1975
Publication Date: 1975-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 1
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