SELF-ERASURE AND SELF-CONSTRUAL IN PHILIP ROTH’S THE HUMAN STAIN
SELF-ERASURE AND SELF-CONSTRUAL IN PHILIP ROTH’S THE HUMAN STAIN

Summary/Abstract: Under the guise of the campus novel, Philip Roth’s multilayered interrogation of contemporaneity in The Human Stain notoriously blends the author’s preoccupations with history, politics, social convention, and America’s ‘moral mood’ at the end of the 20th century. Although not as clearly placed in the proximity of mental and physical exhaustion and, eventually, extinction as Roth’s later novels, it is, nevertheless, cleverly built upon a series of literal and symbolic deaths/ murders/ suicides and rebirths of the self. The present paper aims to reveal and decode their oftentimes perplexing nature, their objective and subjective causes, their intended and accomplished effects.

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