Announcing the Roth Remembered Conference, April 7-9, 2019.
Call For Papers: “Roth Remembered” Conference
April 7-9, 2019
The Philip Roth Society is pleased to announce a call for papers for “Roth Remembered,” a conference organized in conjunction with Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History at New York University and the Center for Jewish History, to take place April 7-9, 2019 in New York City. The conference will take place on NYU's campus and at the Center for Jewish History, which is a short walk from NYU's campus. This three-day conference will feature a multi-disciplinary consideration of Roth's career and legacy, and will feature a keynote address by Charles McGrath, the former editor of The New York Times Book Review and former deputy editor of The New Yorker who is currently a writer-at-large for The New York Times. The novelist Elisa Albert, author of the short story collection How this Night is Different (Free Press, 2006) and the novels The Book of Dahlia (Free Press, 2008) and After Birth (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), will also give a talk on Roth’s legacy.
As Zadie Smith wrote in her own remembrance of Roth in The New Yorker, “Sheer energy—Roth’s central gift and the quality he shared with America itself—is his legacy to literature, and it will always be there, ready to be siphoned off or mixed with some new element by somebody new. That Rothian spirit—so full of people and stories and laughter and history and sex and fury—will be a source of energy as long as there is literature.” Paper and panel proposals for “Roth Remembered” might engage with this idea of the “Rothian spirit,” addressing any element of Roth’s work with an eye to his legacy and lasting contributions to American literature, culture, politics, and history. Specific topics could include (but are not limited to): engagement with American politics in fiction and nonfiction; humor and irony; literary style and craft; Roth’s international presence; contributions to the confessional style; representations of gender and sexuality; a consideration of the groundbreaking Portnoy’s Complaint after 50 years; literary predecessors and inheritors; representations of Jewish American history and identity; and Roth’s alter-egos.
Proposals (not exceeding 250 words) for individual papers should be emailed to the Roth Society Program Chair, Maggie McKinley, at mmckinle@harpercollege.edu. Proposals for full panels (three or four papers) will also be accepted. Deadline for proposals is September 15, 2018. All participants will be notified of their status by October 1, 2018. Please include institutional affiliation and full contact details. If you’re interested in chairing a session please let us know.
To present a paper as a part of a Roth Society panel, participants must be members of the Philip Roth Society. For membership information, please see the Society’s website at http://rothsociety.org.
