Louise Glück's Twenty-First-Century Lyric

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 ren...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 2014-03, Vol.129 (2), p.188-203
Main Author: SASTRI, REENA
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Critical readings
Gluck, Louise (1943-2023)
Honesty
Language poetry
Linguistics
Literary criticism
Lyric poetry
Modernist poetry
Philosophy
Philosophy of language
Poetics
Poetry
Romantic poetry
Subjectivity
Words
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Summary: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 pseudoposthumous 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.
ISSN:0030-8129
1938-1530
DOI:10.1632/pmla.2014.129.2.188