[Another entry
in my biannual
series on interesting and impressive new
releases in AmericanStudies. Add your favorite works, new or old, in
comments for a crowd-sourced weekend reading list!]
On a book that
exemplifies two important scholarly trends.
Over the last
few years, without any overt plan to do so, I’ve devoted a significant portion
of my scholarly work to Philip Roth. That has included both part of an American
Literary Realism article and
(even more fully) an essay
in an edited collection analyzing Roth’s masterpiece American Pastoral (1997), and
culminated in my work on the
Oxford Bibliographies entry on Roth. I’ve greatly enjoyed the chance to
research and write all those pieces, and hope that they have added a bit to our
scholarly conversations about the ongoing career of this seminal American
novelist; but perhaps the most significant effect of this focus on Roth has
been how much it has exposed me to the international community of scholars working
on him and his texts. I wrote in a
long ago post about one such international Roth scholar, Velichka Ivanova; and
through my connection to Ivanova, I was introduced to a book manuscript by
another such scholar, Ann Basu.
Well, with a bit
of feedback (and a back-cover blurb) from me and a few other scholars, and
mostly a lot of great work from Basu herself, that manuscript became States
of Trial: Manhood in Philip Roth’s Post-War America (Bloomsbury, 2014).
Like Ivanova’s edited collection Reading
Philip Roth’s American Pastoral
(2011), which includes that aforementioned essay of mine but also contributions
from scholars from around the world, I believe that States of Trial exemplifies the benefits of an international
American Studies community and approach. For one thing, there’s the way in
which Basu includes and employs theoretical concepts without losing her clear
focus on the texts and histories with which she’s concerned—at times, in
American scholarship, theorizing can seem like a separate choice from close
reading or historicizing, but Basu weds them all in a way that feels to my mind
distinctly European. And for another, there’s the outsider-insider dynamic of
her approach not only to Roth but to American culture and identity, one that
allows her to perceive through a new lens the prominence of a theme like “trial”
across the second half of the 20th century.
In the way she
deploys that thematic thread, Basu’s book also exemplifies a truly, potently interdisciplinary
approach to literary analysis. Through her close readings and historical and
cultural contextualizations of five principal novels (Operation Shylock, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human
Stain, and The Plot Against America),
as well as the few that both preceded and followed this period of Roth’s
career, Basu brings that lens of “trial” to bear on a wide range of different
subjects: masculinity and gender studies, the Cold War and law/justice, race
and ethnicity, disease and studies of the body, the Constitution and theories
of democracy and governance, and religion and morality, among others. Which is
to say, Basu’s book is interdisciplinary not simply in the works on which she
focuses or the historical and cultural connections through which she contextualizes
them, but also and even more strikingly in the methodologies through which she
analyzes them and the conversations into which those analyses enter. For that
reason, as I put it in my back-cover blurb, even those American Studies with no
specific interest in Roth will find a great deal to learn and take away from
Basu’s impressive book.
Next new book
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
AmericanStudies books would you recommend?
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