Moral obligation to write well

This afternoon I started the fall semester with a senior seminar on Philip Roth. (A colleague stuck his head in the door before class and asked a student he recognized what the course was about. “Philip Roth,” she said. “The whole thing?” he replied.) How was I to defend spending an entire semester on Roth?

I made the usual wheezing sounds. Roth is the only living writer in the Library of America; he is, as I have bragged elsewhere, one of the five or six greatest novelists that America has ever produced; along with John Updike, he opened the floodgates to sex in the contemporary American novel; along with Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, he ignited the Jewish boom in American writing; he contributed more novels to Harold Bloom’s Western Canon than any other living novelist.

All of those claims sounded like jacket blurbs in my ears. One thing has always stood out when I read Philip Roth.

No other writer I can name has accepted with such utter self-abnegating devotion to what I can only call, in a blatant allusion to John Erskine’s famous 1915 essay, the moral obligation to write well. This is, I believe, the sum and substance of what it means to respect the institution of literature. The writer shoulders a double burden. Not only must he, like the research scientist, make sure that what he says corresponds to experience. This is only one sense of getting it right. He must also, and this obligation the scientist need not undertake unless there is an extraneous literary dimension to his research, get it right in graceful uncompromising language.

This double obligation—both to truth and to beauty, for lack of better words—is what distinguishes the great writer. And no writer has been as successful as Roth—as steadfast, for so long, through so many books—at living by the insistence upon getting it right. The refusal to approximate, the denial of propositional and stylistic vagueness, is his fury.

Update: After repeated requests, I append the syllabus to my Roth seminar:

Reading list
Required
Roth, Philip. Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories [1959]. New York: Vintage, 1994.
———. Portnoy’s Complaint [1969]. New York: Vintage, 1994.
———. The Ghost Writer [1979]. New York: Vintage, 1995.
———. The Counterlife [1986]. New York: Vintage, 1996.
———. American Pastoral [1997]. New York: Vintage, 1998.
———. The Human Stain [2000]. New York: Vintage, 2001.
———. The Plot against America [2004]. New York: Vintage, 2005.

Recommended
Parrish, Timothy. The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Roth, Philip. Reading Myself and Others [1975]. New York: Vintage, 2001.

Course work
This is a writing-intensive course, and as such it will place a large responsibility for writing upon you. You will be expected to write twelve weekly papers, between three hundred and three hundred fifty words, due every Thursday starting the second week of class (September 10). Most of these will be on a question asked in class, although occasionally you will be invited to “react” to a text or passage. The final paper will be a twelve- to fifteen-page essay in literary criticism (i.e., around five thousand words, more or less). The topic of the paper will be assigned, although you will be able to modify it in discussion with the instructor. You will be expected to do outside reading to complete it—that is, reading not on the syllabus—and you will submit a first draft about halfway through the semester and a second draft two weeks later before turning in the finished product in December.

Course schedule
Sept 1—Introduction
Sept 3—“Defender of the Faith” in Goodbye, Columbus (pp. 175–214)
Sept 8—Goodbye, Columbus (pp. 13–117)
Sept 10—Goodbye, Columbus (pp. 117–48)
Sept 15—Portnoy’s Complaint (“The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Met”; “Whacking Off”)
Sept 17—Portnoy’s Complaint (“The Jewish Blues”)
Sept 22—Portnoy’s Complaint (“Cunt Crazy”)
Sept 24—Portnoy’s Complaint (“The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life”; “In Exile”)
Sept 29—The Ghost Writer (1. Maestro)
Oct 1—The Ghost Writer (2. Nathan Dedalus)
Oct 6—The Ghost Writer (3. Femme Fatale)
Oct 8—The Ghost Writer (“Married to Tolstoy”)
Oct 13—The Counterlife (1. Basel)
Oct 15—The Counterlife (2. Judea; 3. Aloft)
Oct 20—The Counterlife (4. Gloucestershire)
Oct 22—The Counterlife (5. Christendom)
Oct 24—First draft due
Oct 27—American Pastoral (I. Paradise Remembered)
Oct 29—American Pastoral (II. The Fall, pp. 117–74)
Nov 3—American Pastoral (II. The Fall, pp. 175–281)
Nov 5—American Pastoral (III. Paradise Lost)
Nov 7—Second draft due
Nov 10—The Human Stain (1. Everyone Knows)
Nov 12—The Human Stain (2. Slipping the Punch)
Nov 17—The Human Stain (3. What Do You Do with the Kid Who Can’t Read? 4. What Maniac Conceived It?)
Nov 19—The Human Stain (5. The Purifying Ritual)
Dec 1—The Plot against America (pp. 1–82)
Dec 3—The Plot against America (pp. 83–152)
Dec 8—The Plot against America (pp. 153–362)