《公共領域視野里的社會批評——菲利普·羅斯小說研究》系統分析了美國猶太作家菲利普·羅斯在其作品中表現出的對公共領域的批評，并論述了其社會批評策略和批評意識的發展變化。羅斯在其創作初期以喜劇式諷刺為策略，對墮落的公共領域進行了尖銳的批評；中期則充分利用替身游戲超越生死界限，來表現充滿多樣性、矛盾性與不確定性的跨國公共領域，并展現自己對猶太問題的獨到思考和見解；創作后期又以現實主義再現為策略，真實地表現以碎裂性和瑣碎化為主要特征的后現代公共領域。與此同時，他的社會批評意識經歷了從激進到含蓄、保守的變化，而這些又與其猶太性和美國性意識的發展變化密不可分。作為極具社會批判意識和道德責任感的作家，羅斯通過貫徹其文學創作始末的公共領域的文本再現，試圖引導讀者從不同角度對公共性事件進行反思，這也在廣泛意義上印證了文學的社會功能。
Introduction
One of the facts partially accounting for the literary fame of Philip Roth (1933–) is the simultaneity of his arguable Jewishness， previously questioned but ultimately accepted with new interpretation， and his arresting Americanness， embodied in from the communal sense to the national awareness and even the international reference. As a controversial as well as an enchanting figure， Roth stands in the field of Jewish-American literature with one hand clutching tightly the fertile Jewish soil and the other hand mining the rich material beneath the American land. Over a career spanning more than five decades， Roth has been among the center of the intellectual ferment of the second half of the twentieth century and received serious attention from a range of reading constituencies. Elbowing his way all through heavy-flinging condemnations and high-sounding commendations， Roth has finally established himself as an exuberant writer of great significance. Harold Bloom reaffirms that Roth is “centrally Jewish” because the pain of his protagonists is ultimately the result of the “incommensurability” between “a rigorously [Jewish] moral normative tradition” and “the reality of the way we live now” (Bloom， 1986: 2). Roth， however， has never given up the effort to “climb[ing] over the ethnic fence” . As a Jew born in the new post-immigrant age where Goyish-Gentile conflict is no essential concern and a Jew experiencing his booming years in a politically and socially eventful era， Roth， like most of the Americans， cannot live without any political and social involvement in one way or another. As a man with extraordinary intellectual thinking， Roth， like all the other social realists， cannot live without self-conscious concern for and reflection on the public world. It is in Roth—the right person in the proper time—other than Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud that we find the greater possibility to reveal a self-conscious critical awareness of the Jewish-American writers.
A better understanding of Roth cannot be separated from the development of the Jewish-American literary history and the place wherein Roth is posited. The Jewish-American literature in the first half of the 20th century finds its manifestation in early immigrant experience， hardship， assimilation and problems inherent in the process， in the works of Abraham Cahan， Mary Antin， Anzia Yezierska， Michael Gold， Henry Roth and Nathanael West. Since the early fifties of the twentieth century the Jewish American writers have been placed in a prominent position in American literature ， among which the cooperative effort of the group headed by Bellow， Malamud， Roth could never be underestimated . From Bellow， “Jewishness moved in from the immigrant margins to become a new form of American regionalism” by naturalizing the immigrant voice (Wisse， 2003: 205). Thus， Jewish-American literature greeted the arrival of its Renaissance with the location of itself in the representation of “the crisis of modernity: the need to construct a post-Holocaust humane society” among which the principal themes confronted are “the identity oppositions; the Jew as existential everyman; Jewish writing as the inheritor of modernism; the literature of rootless， nomadic contemplation; and the varieties of American experience” (Fried， 1988: 3) other than the simple realistic description of the bewildering travails of immigrant Jews in a secular city.
It is difficult to fix Roth on a specific location in the Jewish-American literary history. Criticism can find him a novelist of close domestic observation， but also a writer immersed in international consciousness. In Roth one may discover vestiges of realism， and on the other hand he is notoriously metafictional in the widest sense. When his experimental enquiry about the old European Jewish home attracts much attention， it is easy for us to discover remnants of important Jewish American preoccupations in his works. Roth inherits both didactic realism and experimental modernism from the Jewish-American literary tradition and simultaneously absorbs postmodern innovation. From Saul Bellow， the Jewish-American fiction has been “avant-garde in its constructions， formulations， and basic focus on a renewed subject， a composite of a new struggling for consciousness which combines the ‘ethical Jewhood’ with the inner studies of the new-born Jewish identity within new American ideas of selfhood” (Wade， 1996: 10). However， it is Roth that makes it avant-garde to the far-more-thorough-scale in the sense that in his works the post-Holocaust Jewhood is postmodernized and the private concerns are publicized， Americanized， and even internationalized. Thus， Roth is a far more important writer to show his readers that “how he wrote was as important as the contentious subjects he had always chosen” (Wade， 1996: 12).
Though placed in the same battlefront with acclaimed authors as Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud， Roth has produced a sub
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