The Big Blue Read

 

Read Philip Roth's seismic novel, The Human Stain (2000), winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

Discuss the book at reunions with Emily Greenwood, Professor of Classics

The AYA invites you to take time before reunions to read Philip Roth’s The Human Stain.  During Saturday’s “Morning at Yale,” Emily Greenwood, Professor of Classics, will offer a multi-faceted lecture and discussion of the work, drawing on her research on the Classics and modern-day literature.

Professor Greenwood explains, "Roth’s The Human Stain ostensibly begins as a campus novel with a twist, as the protagonist Coleman Silk is introduced as the first Jewish Classics professor at Athena College, soon to be embroiled in a twofold disciplinary action from his university. The narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, struggles to uncover the truth about a man who has dissembled his entire existence, and Roth plays with his readers whose reading of the protagonist and his shifting identity implicates them in the complex social drama at the heart of the novel.

"On the surface the novel seems to foster a distrust of the Classics as yet another civilizational pretext, but Roth simultaneously draws on the plots of Greek tragedy and the figure of Achilles, whose alienation from his own society could said to be the beginning of Greek tragedy. A seismic novel about passing and what passes for civilization at the turn of the twenty-first century."

Emily Greenwood studied Classics at Cambridge University, where she gained her BA, MPhil, and PhD degrees. After finishing her PhD she was a research fellow at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge (2000–2002), before joining the department of Classics at the University of St Andrews where she was lecturer in Greek from 2002–2008.

She is currently writing a book entitled Classics: a Beginner's Guide, for Oneworld Publications.

Her research interests include ancient Greek historiography, Greek prose literature of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, twentieth century classical receptions (especially uses of Classics in Africa, Britain, the Caribbean, and Greece), Classics and Postcolonialism, and the theory and practice of translating the "classics" of Greek and Roman literature.

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