Philip Roth Studies

In a period of immanent crisis when comprehensive historical narratives are no longer possible—nor is utopia—dystopia, or rather uchronia tinged with dystopia, seems to be a rather effective means to construct a sweeping historical narration. Through the “timeless time” of uchronia in which—as Ricoeur explains in Time and Narrative (vol. III)—“we are torn between two fleeing horizons” so that “our present sees itself in crisis,” Roth looks back at a counterfactual past in order to better investigate historical causality and to embrace past and present into a postmodern problematic perspective on the temporal dimension.