Graduation Semester and Year

2006

Language

English

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in English

Department

English

First Advisor

Laurin Porter

Abstract

In The Plot Against America, Philip Roth questions the common perception of historic "inevitability" by creating a counter-factual history, placing himself and his childhood family into a fictional World War II America. Through the novel's imaginary political and historical events, Roth's alternate American history (in which Charles Lindbergh is President) creates a powerful sense of fear that permeates the novel. In this paper, I examine Roth's use of history in The Plot by exploring the novel's blurring of alternate history, dystopia, "imagined autobiography," bildungsroman, and Holocaust genres. I also examine how the narrator (literally/fictionally Roth) conducts in the novel a choir of competing narrative voices--part seven-year-old boy, part adult storyteller, part historian, part Jewish-American. Roth's use of competing discourses in The Plot, along with his blurring of historical/fictional boundaries, forces us (as readers) to consider/reconsider our own histories in a post-9/11 world.

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

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