Gerard O'Donoghue

New York University, Expository Writing Program, Faculty Member

University of Oxford, English Language and Literature, Graduate Student

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Gerard O’Donoghue is Clinical Associate Professor in the Expository Writing program (EWP) at NYU and a mentor in EWP’s Writing Tutor Program. Gerard teaches writing and research practices to students across NYU’s undergraduate schools and collaborates with faculty across the disciplines to support disciplinary writing though tailored peer-tutor collaborations. Gerard also mentors undergraduate tutors in EWP's Writing Partner Program who work in long-term peer-tutoring relationships with international and multilingual students. Gerard also serves as a Writing Consultant in legal writing through a EWP collaboration with NYU Law School’s Lawyering Program. Since 2023, Gerard also holds a position as Faculty Fellow in Residence in NYU's Residential College, fostering first-year students co-curricular learning and bridging academic and social dimensions of the first-year student experience.

Book:
_The Paternal Thanatographies of Paul Auster and Philip Roth: American Kaddishim._ Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2019. <https://search.worldcat.org/title/1053595687>

Essays and Reviews:

"Roth in Adaptation.” In _Philip Roth in Context_, ed. Magdalen McKinley, Cambridge University Press, 2021. <https://search.worldcat.org/title/1261646931>

“Roth on the American Screen: 'Serious' Literature and Popular Democracy.” _Roth Remembered_, special issue of _Philip Roth Studies_, vol. 16, no. 1, 2020. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5703/philrothstud.16.1.0053>

Rev. of Philip Roth Through the Lens of Kepesh, by Paul McDonald and Samantha Roden. _Philip Roth Studies_, vol. 13, no. 2, 2017, pp. 126-29. <https://muse.jhu.edu/article/669617>

“Disjunctive Predicaments: Philip Roth as Novelist of Uneven Development.” _Philip Roth Studies_, vol. 11, no.1, 2015, pp. 53-74. <https://doi.org/10.1353/prs.2015.a577330>

“Hermenauts Ashore: Dublin James Joyce Summer School, 6th-13th July 2014.” Dublin James Joyce Journal, vol. 6-7, 2014-2015, pp. 171-78. <https://muse.jhu.edu/article/583075>

“Philip Roth’s Hebrew School.” _Philip Roth Studies_, vol. 6, no. 2, 2010, pp. 35-48. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5703/philrothstud.6.2.153>

Rev. of _Irish Novels 1890-1940: New Bearings in Culture and Fiction_, by John Wilson Foster. Notes and Queries, vol. 56, no. 3, 2009, pp. 472-473. <https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjp091>

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Conference Presentations by Gerard O'Donoghue

Contextualizing Ireland’s Same-Sex Marriage Referendum in Irish Literature; NeMLA Convention, CT, March 17-20, 2016; Women’s and Gender Studies Caucus-sponsored Panel

by Mary Burke, Tara Harney-Mahajan, Ph.D., and Gerard O'Donoghue

In 1993, the Republic of Ireland was among the last countries in the West to decriminalize homose... more In 1993, the Republic of Ireland was among the last countries in the West to decriminalize homosexuality. However, social change has been rapid in recent decades, and some 22 years later, Ireland has just become the first jurisdiction to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote. (Civil partnerships for same-sex couples have been legal in Ireland since 2010.) In May of 2015, Irish voters were asked whether they agreed with the statement: "Marriage may be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex." The “Yes” vote prevailed, with only one out of Ireland’s 43 constituencies returning a “No” vote in the count. This panel will open with a five-minute potted history and contextualization of the same-sex marriage campaign by the chair in order to situate the papers that follow. The papers will ask how this monumental vote alters our readings of Irish culture. Has the institution of marriage been radicalized in Ireland for longer than might be imagined? Does our perception of key literary texts or historical events alter in light of the vote? With hindsight, are previously elided queer readings of marriage or union/Union in Irish culture suddenly more visible?
ABSTRACTS ATTACHED

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Papers by Gerard O'Donoghue

"Roth in Adaptation" (Book Chapter)

_Philip Roth in Context_, ed. Magdalen McKinley, Cambridge University Press, 2021., 2021

Expectations for David Simon and Ed Burns' forthcoming adaptation of The Plot Against America hav... more Expectations for David Simon and Ed Burns' forthcoming adaptation of The Plot Against America have been stoked by both their critical prestige and audience anticipation of their work's political salience amidst discourse on contemporary fascistic currents in American life. These expectations may be tempered, however, by remembering the cool reception given to previous adaptations of Roth's fiction. Anthony Lane's claim is representative of the consensus: of the "Roth adaptations that have reached the screen, all have failed, some more gracefully than others." The verdict that all have failed, despite their wide-ranging quality and dispersal over six decades, may prompt us to question what "success" means in this context. That question orients this survey of the ten adaptions to date.

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Disjunctive Predicaments: Philip Roth as Novelist of Uneven Development

Philip Roth Studies, 2015

It is difficult to reconcile the praise Roth’s fiction has received as a form of historical writi... more It is difficult to reconcile the praise Roth’s fiction has received as a form of historical writing with the skepticism and love of deception his narra-tors confess to. This essay turns to theories of uneven development in the fields of Marxist historiography and critical geography to find historiographic models congruent with Roth’s narrative engagements with history. It argues that Roth’s “historical imagining” (Plot 364) is an agonistic investment in an American national historiography that we might conceive of as a disjunctive totality of overlapping temporalities and competing narratives within which we hear simultaneous testimony of both liberal progress and primitive accumulation.

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Roth on the American Screen: “Serious” Literature and Popular Democracy

Philip Roth Studies, 2020

Philip Roth seemed to endorse Leo Glucksman’s thesis in I Married a Communist (1998)—that politic... more Philip Roth seemed to endorse Leo Glucksman’s thesis in I Married a Communist (1998)—that politics, “the great generalizer,” stands in “an antagonistic relationship” to literature, “the great particularizer” (606)—during the public address he gave upon his eightieth birthday. Roth pronounced, “a fervor for the singular and a profound aversion to generalities is fiction’s lifeblood” (“The Ruthless Intimacy” 393). Glucksman, however, made his declaration from the margins of a novel profoundly concerned with national politics—a novel, moreover, which participates in a trilogy that initiated what Bryan Cheyette calls the “national turn” in Roth’s late career (163). The tensions between the mission of what Glucksman defines as “serious literature” (Communist 607) and readings of Roth’s fiction’s salience, or instrumentality, in national politics are only heightened when that fiction is adapted for the screen. This essay examines these tensions within two 2016 screen adaptations of Roth’s fiction: Ewan McGregor’s American Pastoral and James Schamus’s Indignation.

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Books by Gerard O'Donoghue

The Paternal Thanatographies of Paul Auster and Philip Roth: American Kaddishim

In the span of little more than a decade, Paul Auster and Philip Roth—two writers radically dissi... more In the span of little more than a decade, Paul Auster and Philip Roth—two writers radically dissimilar in style and vision—each produced a series of texts that bore the imprint of the author’s father’s death. This study examines these two series: Auster’s The Invention of Solitude (1982) and The New York Trilogy (1987), and Roth’s The Facts (1988), Deception (1990), Patrimony (1991), and Operation Shylock (1993). Within these two transgeneric series, Auster and Roth juxtaposed the textual incorporation of their given names with the thanatographic acts they dedicated to their fathers, Sam Auster and Herman Roth. This juxtaposition prompts us to reflect upon the status of the author’s given name as a textual inheritance and vehicle of communal memory.
Auster’s and Roth’s assertions of artistic autonomy from familial and ethnoreligious obligations have been career-defining. However (and perhaps unsurprisingly), the writing prompted by the deaths of their fathers retraces their respective itineraries as Jewish sons and as American writers. As these itineraries unfold, aesthetic differences between the two authors cannot obscure the historical commonalities shared by two men born fourteen years apart in Newark, New Jersey, as grandsons to the Galician Jewish immigrants who bore the names ‘Auster’ and ‘Roth’ across the Atlantic and into American life.
By examining the composition histories of and the intertextual indebtedness within each of these series, this study offers a reading of Auster’s and Roth’s works as forms of kaddish. While readers may be justifiably skeptical at the thought of placing liturgical language in the mouths of avowedly secular writers, this study argues that Auster’s and Roth’s works engage, tendentiously, in a discourse that reconciles the bereaved child to the limitations, merits, and the loss of the deceased parent. In doing so, these writers are drawn into a broader discourse of Jewish filiation in the United States under conditions that oblige them to subordinate their originality as literary authors to their derivativeness as historical and genealogical subjects. To read these texts as kaddishim is to recognize Auster and Roth as being engaged in active projects of inheriting the names, myths, and historical predicaments entailed by being their fathers’ sons.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Thanatography and Autography
Chapter 2: “The Objects of a Dead Man”: Inheritance and Theft
Chapter 3: Teeth for Biting: Anxious Inheritance and Extreme Chastisement
Chapter 4: The Holocaust in American Memory
Chapter 5: The Pillow of Stone: Sacred Texts in Secular Writing
Coda
Bibliography
Index
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Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, Digital
Hardcover: ISBN 9781621964285
Paperback: ISBN 9781638571407
Pages: 250
Date: March 2019
Size: 6 x 9 in or 229 x 152 mm

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Contextualizing Ireland’s Same-Sex Marriage Referendum in Irish Literature; NeMLA Convention, CT, March 17-20, 2016; Women’s and Gender Studies Caucus-sponsored Panel

by Mary Burke, Tara Harney-Mahajan, Ph.D., and Gerard O'Donoghue

Download

"Roth in Adaptation" (Book Chapter)

_Philip Roth in Context_, ed. Magdalen McKinley, Cambridge University Press, 2021., 2021

Download

Disjunctive Predicaments: Philip Roth as Novelist of Uneven Development

Philip Roth Studies, 2015

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Roth on the American Screen: “Serious” Literature and Popular Democracy

Philip Roth Studies, 2020