Philip Roth's Nostalgia for the Yiddishkayt and the New Deal Idealisms in The Plot Against America
This essay reads Philip Roth's The Plot Against America as testifying to the novelist's reengagement with and recovery of his essential Jewish racial identity as well as his re-vision of America as the promised land for its Jews. Situating the complex cultural politics of yiddishkayt in the matrix of the New Deal idealism of the Rooseveltian era, it addresses the novelist's engagement with American democracy that has safeguarded the Jews and other immigrants from being persecuted.
Between Dystopia and Allohistory: The Ending of Roth’s The Plot Against America
Between two experimental morphologies, that of dystopia and that of allohistory, Philip Roth’s novel tells the story of a single family facing hard times, as seen through the eyes of its 7 to 9 year-old younger son but told from a retrospective standpoint of, as it were, the same person when a mature intellectual and a remorseful survivor, several decades later. The last word of the main narrative is “prosthesis.” This paper analyzes the novel’s motif of prosthesis, in the literal and in the figurative sense, in light of Marshall McLuhan’s concept of “autoamputation” in Understanding Media, and in light of the recurrent patterns of Jewish history which the protagonist narrator replicates despite himself. This discussion of the semantic and syntactic aspects of the prosthesis motif is then brought to bear on the pragmatic aspect of the novel—its bid for, and partial control of, the reader’s sympathy for the erring protagonist.
Participation Improves Collective Decisions (When It Involves Deliberation): Experimental Evidence From Kenya
Abstract Citizen participation in decision making has been widely lauded as a method for improving societal outcomes. Deliberative discussion, in particular, is believed to be more transformative than a mere aggregation of individual preferences, leading to more socially optimal decision making and behavior. I report the results from a laboratory experiment with 570 subjects in Nairobi, directly testing the effect of participation in deliberative group decision making on collective outcomes. Participants engage in a group task to earn compensation toward a shared group fund. Randomly assigned treatments vary according to whether decision making over the task to be completed involves: (1) external assignment; (2) non-deliberative majority voting; or (3) consensus through deliberative discussion. I find that deliberation improves collective decision making. Deliberation is also associated with changes in preferences, greater agreement with decision outcomes, and greater perceived fairness. Evidence for behavior change is weaker, but there is some support for further research into the relationship between preference change and behavior change.