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In The Human Stain, Nathan Zuckerman’s neighbor, Coleman Silk, is a retired classics professor who left his position at Athena College in disgrace after supposedly using a racial epithet to refer to two African-American students.
Synopsis. Coleman Silk is a former professor and dean of the faculty at Athena College, a fictional institution in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, where he still lives. The story is narrated by Roth's recurring character Nathan Zuckerman, a writer and a neighbor of Silk.
"The Human Stain" unfolds in the fictional town of Athena, Massachusetts, against the backdrop of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. The protagonist, Coleman Silk, a respected classics professor at Athena College, finds himself embroiled in a controversy that leads to his resignation.
Oct 31, 2003 · Early in the film, dating a white girl, he takes her home to meet his mother, having not made it clear he is black; his revelation is made through the fact of her appearance, which seems cowardly and cruel. Passing for white is not as uncommon as some of the reviewers of "The Human Stain" seem to think.
Complete summary of Philip Roth's The Human Stain. eNotes plot summaries cover all the significant action of The Human Stain.
The Human Stain is a novel of identity that revolves around the love affair of two people who could not be more opposite. Coleman Silk is a classics professor, a man who was once well respected in his small community before an accusation took from him the identity he spent fifty years creating.
The Human Stain is a novel of sweeping ambition that tells the stories not just of individual lives but of the moral ethos of America at the end of the twentieth century. How would that ethos be described?
The Human Stain begins with an epigraph from the ancient Greek tragedy Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles (496–06 BCE). In this play, it has been many years since Oedipus committed the crimes of unwittingly killing his father and marrying his mother.
May 10, 2000 · It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled.
Dive deep into Philip Roth's The Human Stain with extended analysis, commentary, and discussion.
