“THE ECSTASY OF SANCTIMONY”: AMERICAN CULTURE WARS OF THE 1990s IN PHILIP ROTH’s THE HUMAN STAIN
“THE ECSTASY OF SANCTIMONY”: AMERICAN CULTURE WARS OF THE 1990s IN PHILIP ROTH’s THE HUMAN STAIN

Summary/Abstract: “The Ecstasy of Sanctimony”: American Culture Wars of the 1990s in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. Published last in Philip Roth’s notorious and appraised American Trilogy, The Human Stain (2000) marks the transition to a new century by a critical analysis of the present. After navigating the troubled waters of the Vietnam War-haunted 1960s in American Pastoral and diving into the 1940s postwar Red Scare in I Married a Communist, Roth turns from the openly violent and traumatic to the complacent, ideologically conflictual, and cliché-ridden atmosphere of his immediate reality. Campus life in 1990s New England is a fierce battleground, particularly when satirically observed against the backdrop of the 1998 Presidential impeachment. The unsettling confrontation of social stereotypes, the vexatious quarrels of identity politics, the intransigence of what the American academia’s sententious rhetoric embraces as ‘political correctness’ are all foregrounded as pillars of private and public, individual and communal self-invention and self-delusion at the turn of the millennium. Coleman Silk’s life, career, and relationships are inextricably linked to and determined by the sociohistorical constraints of the Nation’s old, new, and imagined struggles with itself. This article aims to examine Roth’s provocative exploration of contemporary consciousness, its underlying moral quandaries and conformities, in a work of fiction that has become a classic of social commentary.

• Details
• Contents