PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO JEWISH SELF IN ROTH’S FICTIONALITY: A CINEMATIC REPRESENTATION OF SUBJECTIVITY
PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO JEWISH SELF IN ROTH’S FICTIONALITY: A CINEMATIC REPRESENTATION OF SUBJECTIVITY

Summary/Abstract: This article proposes a critical self-diagnosing survey as an alternative psychological act of self-disclosure in Roth’s fictionality. In deconstructing the proteic concept of Jewish identity, Roth’s self-reflection permeates the narrative by infinite voices forging subjectivity to play a central role in Roth’s fiction, bearing multifaceted, polyphonic determinations: racial, ethnical, and sexual. Roth mirrors an integrated, restored self which is not only reflected by the cultural and social discourses but also socially constructed by signifying American practices. The psychological (i.e. psychodynamic, functional, developmental) as well as discursive approaches of the self – in Roth’s fictionality – reflect Roth’s guilt and frustration (self-criticism/censoring) with his sub-cultural position between mainstream experience and his Jewish-American transgressive self where the feeling of alienation still remains as a psychological residue. This article tackles the idea that the Jewish self does not function only within an imagined psychological ground, but also within an extended cinematic framework (philosophical, moral and sociological) – that challenge our expectations regarding the alternative physical and meta-fictional worlds Roth creates within it.

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