• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.2
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• pp.151-170
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• 2018

This paper examines the relationship and ideas of Hannah Arendt and Philip Roth including how they met, their correspondence and intellectual parallels, particularly in their shared criticism of Jewish ideals and culture in Europe and North America. It analyzes similarities in their careers and texts, especially between Eichmann in Jerusalem and Operation Shylock, as well as The Ghost Writer, while measuring their reception as social commentators and writers. Kafka was an important figure for both writers, Arendt's earliest writing engaged with the significance of Kafka in understanding and criticizing twentieth century political and cultural values in Europe. For Roth, Kafka offered a similar critique of moral principles he found corroded in North American Jewish life. Arendt connected with other writers, notably Isak Dinesen, W. H. Auden, Randall Jarrell and William Styron who further linked the two: he knew both Arendt and Roth and cited, incorrectly, a work by Arendt as the source for the key incident in his 1979 novel Sophie's Choice. He claimed it was Eichmann in Jerusalem; it was Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt's reaction to Roth's fiction, however, remains a mystery: she died in 1975, before Roth began to seriously and consistently engage with Holocaust issues in works like The Ghost Writer (1979) and Operation Shylock (1993). Yet even in death they are joined. Their graves are only steps apart at the Bard College Cemetery in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.3
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• pp.453-468
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• 2018

Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831 was considered pre Civil War South's most dreadful nightmare due to the merciless murder of white slave owner victims. The motive of vengeance has been emphasized as that of Turner's notorious black preacher religious fanaticism. However, the recent film, The Birth of a Nation (2016) directed by Nate Parker, utilized the identical title of a film (1915) directed by D. W. Griffith. Providing limited evidence, information about the rebellion in Thomas Gray's pamphlet The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831), was the only accessible historical source for the factual event of the slaves' rebellion. In addition, William Styron's The Confessions of Turner (1967), a fictionalized biography, also examined Turner's life in the harshness of slavery. Although these two texts deal with the personal level of Nat Turner's rage and religious enthusiasm, both provide only fractured parts of the motive of vengeance. Strikingly, Parker's film interrogates the ideology of "victims," as well as the hierarchical term of "confessions," with their different positions between whites and blacks. More specifically, Parker's film offers discursive fields of proslavery arguments regarding biblical interpretations in addition to external visualization of slaves' inner emotional lives. The film demonstrates how the institution of slavery allowed slaves to be exploited, beaten, raped, through interrogating the problematic image of the "contested hero" Nat Turner. In contrast to the traditional image of blacks' bloody rebellion, the film underlines the absurdity of certain Biblical misinterpretations. It furthermore implies how the 1915 film manipulated proslavery propaganda in America.