| Eighty-year-old Philip Roth is definitely a legendary Jewish writer with his30books in the fifty-year writing career. Philip Roth often claims himself not to be a Jewish writer but happens to be a Jew. In spite of this, his novels still focus on the Jewish world. His special cultural background enables him to form a unique understanding of Ameican Jewish culture. Throughout his writing career, he has been harboring a traumatic complex. The Jews are noted for their sufferings in the long history. The nightmare-like Holocaust, together with the difficult assimilation and the post-war social turmoil of the U.S.A, provides materials for Philip Roth’s trauma narrative. The Jewish traumatic memory gives birth to his writing motivation. Roth’s trauma narrative is typical for its combination of both the broad sense of cultural traumas and the traumas on the original theoretical basis. Roth’s trauma narrative not only inherits the traditional writing themes of the Jewish writers but also pays attention to the newly found themes like racial problems, post-alienation and political issues like McCarthyism. By doing so, Philip Roth has enriched the themes of his narrartive and made it touching and thought-provoking. His special academic and writing backgrounds make him possess deep insight and modern consciousness.My dissertation aims at a research of Philip Roth’s trauma narrative. His trauma narrative discloses its psychological connection with the traumatic memory. Its focus is cultural trauma in the Jewish Amerian cultural assimilation process. Cultural trauma involves bitter memories which are intense, profound and unlikely to be eliminated. It also exerts great influence on collective identity and the future of the social group. What’s more, it is not an expericne in-itself but an active sense-making process. Cultural trauma is characteristic of self-consciousness, subjectivity and reflectivity. Philip Roth’s trauma narrative is a sense-making action of the modern Jews’experience of Americanising process. It obtains a strong sense of existence by paying close attention to the identity crisis and dilemmas of the Jewish people caused by history and modernity. To represent trauma, Philip Roth subverts the traditional linear narrative by employing post-modernism narrative strategies such as metafiction, intertextuality, paradoxical parody and humor. He achieves the writing aim by internalizing the style and content of the trauma narrative. With his trauma narrative, Philip Roth tries to erase his Jewishness in a contradictory way. Eventually, he succeeds in transcending his Jewishness and mediating on the paradox of the civilization and existence of the human beings. The dissertation consists of six parts.The beginning part opens by a brief introduction to his writing career.Then an analysis of the current study of Roth both domestic and abroad is followed. The concluding section of this part gives clues to my theoretical background of traumas, trauma theory and trauma narrative which are considered to be necessary to the research.The first chapter discusses the relationship between cultural memory and his trauma narrative. It covers three points. They are illustrated in a logic way according to the psychoanalytical mode of traumatic writing.The second chapter deals with the cultural traumas in his trauma narrative. In this chapter, I give a detailed analysis of his typical traumatic novels. The discussion focuses on the traumatic experience, assimilation as well as the mutual problems of the whole civilization.The third chapter is intended to interprete Philip Roth’s trauma narrative from the perspective of existentialism and Freudian. This chapter also points out that his works show a close connection with the two thoughts.The fourth chapter aims at illustrating the post-modernity of Philip Roth’s trauma narrative by discussing the strategies he employs in his writingThe concluding part gives a general evaluation of his trauma narrative and presents my conclusion of Philip Roth’s trauma narrative. |
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