New Books | Philip Roth - The Continuing Presence: New Essays on Psychological Themes

Philip Roth--The Continuing Presence:
New Essays on Psychological Themes

by Jane Statlander-Slote, PhD

Reviews

The new anecdotes revealed...are fascinating. This volume...helps us as psychologically-attuned readers to understand Roth's particular kind of creativity.
Susan K. Perry, Ph.D., for Psychology Today

...well-developed collection of essays on the interface between literature and psychology in Philip Roth's work.... A revealing analysis for Roth aficionados.
Nanette Norris, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of English Literature - Royal Military College, Quebec

...brilliantly written study on Philip Roth, one of the greatest writers to come out of the Jewish-American movement in literature. Statlander digs deep into the core of his opus, and we hit a pulsating nerve. ...a timely disposition hinting to the relevancy of psychology and the arts in contemporary culture; providentially though, this book sets off a lively and multi-layered conversation between psychoanalytical theory, literary criticism, actuality, and fictional narrative, including all the fine trimmings of an editor to find the frequent line of communication amid them all. She fills in the gaps of interpretation about Roth, the long, slammed man and the especially celebrated author, but more so, the dissected patient in his dense renderings about the world as he believed it true to his ambivalent experiences... The heavy laden psychological linkages are what make for an awe-inspiring read.
San Francisco Book Review

Philip Roth - The Continuing Presence is chock-full of psychological analyses of the main author Philip Roth. Sometimes life imitates art or vice versa. Each essay is interesting, giving the reader an inner glimpse of this unique personality....
Valerie Rouse for Readers' Favorite

...wonderful compilation...insightful work...the compilation is very balanced in all respects...a very honest effort by an able educator...it deserves to be treasured and read by Roth's fans and critics alike who seek to develop greater understanding of Roth's work, his character and his thoughts. Namta Gupta, M.A., for BookPleasures

Philip Roth--The Continuing Presence: New Essays on Psychological Themes.
By Jane Statlander-Slote, PhD

Currently available in eBook (off-site)
Released in hardcover and eBook February 1, 2014

Philip Roth - The Continuing Presence: New Essays on Psychological Themes, by Jane Statlander-Slote

Contributing Authors - Victoria Aarons, Andrew Gordon, Daniel Walden, Estelle Gershgoren Novak, Maximillian E. Novak, Jeffrey Berman, Lew Fried, Derek Parker Royal, Miriam Jaffe-Foger, Peter L. Rudnytsky

Cover and backcover PDF of Philip Roth - The Continuing Presence

Interview, July 24, 2013 with author Jane Statlander-Slote

This volume, edited by the internationally renown Roth scholar, Jane Statlander-Slote, also from Newark, New Jersey and a graduate of Weequahic High School, is a ground-breaking collection that explores a topic inimicable to the subject of the book, Philip Roth.

Ever since Roth's psychoanalyst, Dr. Hans Kleinschmidt, rather unethically published an essay in American Imago,”The Angry Act: The Role of Aggression in Creativity.” purportedly about another artist, but, in fact, about Roth in its descriptions of strikingly identical neurotic, dysfunctional manifestations and psychoanalytical self- narratives: in short, Herr Doctor unmasked his analyse’s narcissistic, oedipal and incestuous emotional dysfunctions.

Up until that time, Roth had been having a love affair with psychoanalytic explanations for everyone and everything and used the therapeutic techniques of free association, dream analysis and Freudian psychology in general, as the foundational lynchpin of his books. In the words of Jeffrey Berman: Roth’s "…characters are the most thoroughly psychoanalyzed in literature".

Starting with Libby Herz’s drama-filled connection with Dr. Lumin in Letting Go, Roth has consistently employed the world of psychoanalytical themes, rhetoric and style beginning with Portnoy’s Complaint’s Alexander Portnoy’s monogolous self-confessions to his totally silent psychoanalyst, Dr. Otto Spielvogel, through My Life as a Man, The Breast's David Kepesh’s psychoanalysis with Dr. Klinger and The Professor of Desire. Book figures' motives are explored and exploited. If his figures are not undergoing "the talking cure", they are exploring motives and psycho dramatizing their returns to the primal scene.

Roth pays homage to psychoanalysis at every turn and, as Berman, asserts, "…pays tribute to psychoanalysis by demystifying the patient-analyst relationship and by refusing to render therapists into caricatures or mythic figures."

Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) is Roth’s and America’s most adulated psychoanalytic monologue. Alex Portnoy’s reading consists of the set of Freud’s Collected Papers. In this way Portnoy converts Freudian thinking into imaginatively and playfully rendered "self-play" in a prose form that is decidedly psychoanalytical.

Kleinschmidt’s essay was not well enough disguised (perhaps the analyst ironically and Freudianly wanted to get caught in his act of betrayal). The analyst, Dr. Spielvogel’s psychoanalytical diagnosis of Tarnopol in My Life as a Man was Roth's bitter response to Kleinschmidt’s perfidity against him. Dr. Spielvogel’s account of Tarnopol psychological dysfunction is identical to Dr. Kleinschmidt’s description of the artist he discusses in his own essay.

This then is the heart and the meat of this volume of never-before-published essays and interviews on analyzing Roth in psychological Roth’s work and sometimes Roth in psychological terms.

Key Points of Philip Roth - The Continuing Presence: New Essays on Psychological Themes

- Well-researched

- Scholarly sources and analyses

- New, never before printed revelations

- Condensed Philip Roth Biography - Courtesy of Philip Roth Society

- Complete bibliographical reference of all of Philip Roth's works, including complete reference of extant works about Philip Roth - Courtesy of Philip Roth Society

- Bibliography

- Index

Reviewers may receive a free copy from Edelweiss Above the Treeline or send a message to NorthEast Books & Publishing for a paperback galley or PDF version. Please indicate your preference.

ISBN-13 - Hardcover - 978-0982992456
ISBN-13 - eBook - 9780-982992463

Wholesale book and ebook will be available through Cardinal Publishers Group Baker & Taylor - Ingram
Wholesale ebook: Overdrive - EBSCO

Availability
Philip Roth - The Continuing Presence: New Essays on Psychological Themes will be released approximately December 1, 2013 in hardcover and October 1, 2013 in ebook format. Distribution through Cardinal Publishers Group, Indianapolis, Indiana.

NorthEast Books and Publishing books can also be purchased through established wholesale channels (Baker & Taylor, Ingram, etc) and retail locations (Barnes & Noble, etc.). All wholesale inquiries through Cardinal Publishers Group.

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American Library Association (ALA) Conference 2013 - Chicago, IL

Book Expo America - May 30 - June 1, 2013

Jewish Historical Society of New Jersey Auditorium, Route 10 Whippany, NJ. March 17 at 1:30 and 4 pm.
The Newark Public Library - Tuesday, March 18 at 11 am and 3 pm.
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About the Contributing Authors
Victoria Aarons holds the O.R. & Eva Mitchell Endowed Chair in Literature at Trinity University where she is Chair of the English Department and teaches courses on American Jewish and Holocaust literatures. Dr. Aarons is guest editor for a special issue of Philip Roth Studies titled Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud: Texts of a Relationship. She is currently engaged in research on second and third-generation Holocaust writing.
Jane Statlander-Slote is a Professor of English at Miami International University of Art & Design. She is the author of volumes on Philip Roth, other Jewish-American writers and American Historical Romance, including, Philip Roth's Postmodern American Romance: Critical Essays on Selected Works, 2012; Philip Roth's Postmodern American Romance (Twentieth Century American Jewish Writers), 2010; Cultural Dialectic (Twentieth Century American Jewish Writers), 2002. She is also a documentary film filmmaker.
Andrew Gordon is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Florida, author of An American Dreamer: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Fiction of Norman Mailer; Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg; co-author, with Hernán Vera, of Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness; and co-editor, with Peter L. Rudnytsky, of Psychoanalyses/Feminisms. He has also written many essays on Jewish-American writers, including Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, and Art Spiegelman.
Daniel Walden is Professor Emeritus, Penn State University, who has written about Philip Roth since the 1970s. He was the Founding Editor of Studies in American Jewish Literature (1975-2011), and has 100 articles on Jewish American and African American literature. Please see: http://english.la.psu.edu/faculty-staff/dxw8
Estelle Gershgoren Novak has a Ph.D. in English, specializing in modern American Literature. She has taught at various universities in California for over thirty years, including classes in Jewish American Fiction several times at UCLA. She has published an essay on Philip Roth in Reading Philip Roth(Asher Milbauer and D.G. Watson) and on I.J. Singer in a forthcoming book with Maximillian E. Novak ( “The Writer as Exile: I. J. Singer”). She is also a published poet with three books, The Shape of a Pear, The Flesh of Their Dreams and Lot’s Wife and Other Poems.
Maximillian E. Novak is Distinguished Research Professor of English at UCLA. He has written on modern Jewish-American writers such as I. B. Singer and his brother I.J. Singer. He is well known for his work on the development of the novel, especially for his studies of Daniel Defoe. The course in Jewish-American fiction that he developed and then taught at UCLA for over twenty five years, featuring Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow, was started during the 1960s at a time when few or no such courses existed.
Jeffrey Berman is Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at the University at Albany. He is the author of thirteen books including, most recently, Dying in Character: Memoirs on the End of Life. Please see: Jeffrey Berman Recognized Nationally for Making a Profound Difference Named One of America's Best Professors by Princeton Review
Lew Fried is an Emeritus Professor of English, at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, Lew Fried has written about American-Jewish literature, and American urban thought. He also was the editor of the "United States Literature" section of the recent Encyclopaedia Judaica. In addition, he has lectured in Europe, Asia, and Israel.
Derek Parker Royal is the creator and executive editor of the scholarly journal Philip Roth Studies. He is the author of volumes and essays on Philip Roth and other Jewish-American writers. Dr. Royal received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Purdue University. Other areas of reading and research include American ethnoracial narrative, film studies, Jewish American fiction, late nineteenth-century American literature, and narrative theory. Please see:
Miriam Jaffe-Foger is Director of Writing at the Doctorate in Social Work Program at Rutgers University. She received her PhD from Rutgers in 2008 and is currently at work on her Masters in Social Work. She teaches composition, American literature with a specialty in ethnic studies, and interns for the Tyler Clementi Center. Her publications focus on the work of Philip Roth. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled "Philip Roth and the Narrativization of Illness" as well as a textbook for bridging the gap between writing in the humanities and the sciences.
Peter L. Rudnytsky is a Professor of English at the University of Florida. He is the author of Freud and Oedipus (1987), The Psychoanalytic Vocation: Rank, Winnicott, and the Legacy of Freud (1991), Psychoanalytic Conversations: Interviews with Clinicians, Commentators, and Critics (2000), Reading Psychoanalysis: Freud, Rank, Ferenczi, Groddeck (2002), and Rescuing Psychoanalysis from Freud and Other Essays in Re-Vision (2011). His articles on Roth have appeared in Twentieth Century Literature and Philip Roth Studies.

Philip Roth--The Continuing Presence: New Essays on Psychological Themes

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Philip Roth--The Continuing Presence:
New Essays on Psychological Themes