Open Yale Courses

ENGL 291: The American Novel Since 1945

Lecture 20 - Philip Roth, The Human Stain (cont.) << previous session | next session >>

Overview:

In this lecture Professor Hungerford discusses how the novels we read are shaped by legal and market constraints. She traces a history of censorship from the Comstock laws, to the policing of Joyce's Ulysses and Ginsberg's Howl, and shows how changes in publishing practices have tended to penalize more unusual, less profitable books. Hungerford also touches on the canon debates of the 80s and 90s (citing John Guillory and Toni Morrison), and the issues of intellectual property and internationalization raised by digital literature. Finally, she points to some ways that Philip Roth, despite his controversial representations of Judaism and of women, succeeds in tackling fundamental human concerns.

Reading assignment:

Philip Roth, The Human Stain (2000)

Class lecture:

Transcript
html
Audio
mp3
Video
medium bandwidth
low bandwidth
high bandwidth

Yale University 2008.  Some rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated on this page or on the Open Yale Courses website, all content on this page is licensed under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0)