
Deadline for submissions: January 25, 2017
Full name / name of organization: The Philip Roth Society
Contact email: mmckinle@harpercollege.edu
The Philip Roth Society invites papers for a panel entitled “Other People’s Roths” at the American Literature Association conference in Boston, MA from May 25-28, 2017.
In a 2014 article for The Atlantic entitled “Stop Making Film Adaptations of Philip Roth Novels,” Adam Chandler writes, “There is no aside or montage that could faithfully represent the laborious historical and psychological contexts that Roth devotes pages to developing.” Yet filmmakers have not been dissuaded: this past year, the film adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2008 novel Indignation was released to widespread critical acclaim, and in previous years, Hollywood has produced adaptations of Goodbye, Columbus, Portnoy’s Complaint, The Human Stain, The Dying Animal, The Humbling, and the early short story “Expect the Vandals.” In recent years, versions of Roth himself have also surfaced across a wide variety of media: filmmakers have included representations of Roth in movies (e.g. 2014’s Listen Up, Philip); novelists have embedded versions of Roth in their fiction (e.g. David Baddiel’s 2010 novel The Death of Eli Gold); biographers and documentary filmmakers have attempted to capture the “facts” of Roth’s life (e.g. Claudia Roth Pierpoint’s 2013 book Roth Unbound and the 2014 documentary Philip Roth Unleashed); and artists such as R.B.Kitaj and Bryan Zanisnik have produced illustrations of Roth and his work. “Other People’s Roths” (designed to correspond with a similarly focused forthcoming special issue of Philip Roth Studies) aims to address the various ways Philip Roth and his work have been represented by these and other writers, artists, and filmmakers. The Roth Society invites papers that examine how any such representations and translations have enriched, revised, and/or complicated understandings of Roth, his alter egos, and his fiction.
Proposals (not exceeding 300 words) for 15-20 minute papers should be emailed to the Roth Society Program Chair, Maggie McKinley, at mmckinle@harpercollege.edu by January 25, 2017. Please include institutional affiliation and full contact details. To present a paper as a part of a Roth Society panel, participants must be members of the Philip Roth Society in addition to registering for the conference. For membership information, please see the Society’s website at http://rothsociety.org.