71 ABSTRACT. While the centrality of the genre of tragedy to The Human Stain has been consistently acknowledged by critics, the novel has tended to be read simply as an embodiment of tragedy, rather than as a reflection upon the genre and an examination of its processes and assumptions. Focusing on the relationship between various levels of the text—writer, narrator, hero, reader—and addressing issues of allusion, symbolism and temporality, this essay outlines Roth’s complex re-imagining of contemporary tragedy through Nathan Zuckerman’s narration of the story of Coleman Silk. Philip Roth makes no secret of his intention that The Human Stain (2000) be read with reference to classical tragedy. From the epigraphic citation of Oedipus Rex, to the five-chapter structure capped by a final act entitled “The Purifying Ritual,” to a plot that reads like an exercise in Sophoclean homage—talented hero doggedly refuses to acknowledge a terrible act he has committed, only to succumb to an ironic and mysteriously inevitable fate years later—all the signs point to a sustained effort by the author to fully exploit the conventions and traditional hallmarks of tragedy: seriousness, high rhetoric, a powerful central protagonist, an ambiguous play of agency and fate, a movement towards revelation and death, and the lingering sense of a painful mystery that resists analysis. Moreover, the novel’s consistent allusions to canonical works of tragedy—including The Bacchae, The Iliad, Hamlet and Death in Venice, in addition to Oedipus—suggest that Roth is determined to engage not only with tragic themes and conventions but also with previous tragic literature, and hence to carry out, in narrative form, an intertextual engagement with the history of the genre itself. TRAGIC ALLUSIONS As early critical responses to The Human Stain implicitly testify, this engage- ment intervenes in a contemporary context in which “a rethinking of tragedy Imagining Tragedy: Philip Roth’s The Human Stain Adam Kelly