| Abstrakt: |
In what ways is Philip Roth's framed narrative, The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988), consistent with, and perhaps indebted to, the artistry of "New York Revisited," a chapter of Henry James's autobiographical The American Scene (1907)? And how does Roth's conjuring of narrator Nathan Zuckerman, and then Zuckerman's chastising response to the sentimentality of Roth's narrative, correspond to James's evocation of the "voice of the air"? That voice, a personified commentator echoing James's own reservations about the accuracy of his narrative, takes the author to task for having sometimes romanticized the "facts" of New York, the now-vulgar city of James's childhood. The current study thus suggests the importance of James's personified "voice" for Roth's creation of Zuckerman in The Facts. Aligned with such concern is James's preoccupation with self-consciousness in ways that prefigure Roth's dramatization of Dasein across his oeuvre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
