Roger Porter lectures on Philip Roth and R.B. Kitaj

"Why commit suicide? After all, ‘Everything he hated was here!’: Philip Roth and Kitaj on Death, Sex, and Love”

Philip Roth and R.B. Kitaj became good friends in London during the 80's, and the painter influenced Roth in many ways, especially for the title character of Roth’s greatest novel, Sabbath’s Theater. Roger Porter, Professor of English and Humanities, Emeritus, Reed College focuses his lecture on Roth and Kitaj's shared attitudes, or perhaps those of their characters and their painterly subjects, regarding desire, ecstasy, and the inevitable demise. The title of the lecture is a paraphrase of a quote by the protagonist Sabbath on the last page of Roth's Sabbath's Theater.