Roth and Trauma

Aimee Pozorski is Associate Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, USA, where she teaches contemporary literature and trauma theory. She is the current President of The Philip Roth Society.

"With an engaging combination of personal warmth and scholarly comprehensiveness, as well as an ear attuned to the poetics of prose, Aimee Pozorski expands the horizons of critical discourse by reading the masterpieces of Philip Roth's late period as excavations of 'the darker secrets of American identity,' going back as far as the Revolutionary War.  A sophisticated grasp of the temporality of traumatic experience sustains Pozorski as she bears witness to the cultural wounds laid bare in Roth's work." --Peter L. Rudnytsky, Professor of English, University of Florida, USA, and author of Rescuing Psychoanalysis from Freud and Other Essays in Re-Vision (2011)

• PrefaceAcknowledgments 1. Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works2. "I pledge a legion to the flag": Drenka Balich's Malapropisms and the Traumatic Sublime of the Flag3. American Pastoral and the Traumatic Ideals of Democracy4. "The stars are indispensable": Trauma, Betrayal, and Celebrity in I Married a Communist5. Founding Traumas: Vietnam, Infanticide and The Iliad in The Human Stain6. Terror, Trauma, and "the mockery of Armageddon": The Dying Animal in the New Millennium7. Traumatic Realism, "Afterwardsness" and the Figure of the Child in The Plot Against America8. Exit Ghost: Mourning Zuckerman in the Age of Terror9. "the gravest meaning": Trauma and the Tetralogy of the GraveNotesWorks Cited Index