Cornelius Dieckmann

University of Cambridge, American Literature, Alumnus

Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, English and American Studies, Undergraduate

University of Cambridge, English, Undergraduate

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I have an MPhil in American Literature from the University of Cambridge (2019), where I wrote a dissertation on John Updike, which was published in The John Updike Review (Spring 2021, vol. 8, no. 2). For it, I was awarded the journal’s Emerging Writers Prize.

I also hold a BA in English & American Studies and Comparative Literature from the University of Tübingen (2018), where my final thesis was on Willa Cather’s early fiction. It won the Magenau-Wacker-Preis, issued by the university’s Department of Philology.

I work as a journalist for the magazine Der Spiegel.

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Papers by Cornelius Dieckmann

Too Old to Be Educated: John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom Tetralogy as Post-Bildungsroman

The John Updike Review, 2021

This essay reads John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy in the generic context of the bildungsro... more This essay reads John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy in the generic context of the bildungsroman. Because the Rabbit series rests on the premise of showing a hero after the conclusion of his formal education, I argue that the four novels can be seen as a post-bildungsroman. This notion reconciles the tetralogy’s three-decade-spanning frame – which invites readings focused on character development (Bildung) – with Updike’s narrative decision to leave out the most formative period in Rabbit’s life: his adolescence. I discuss the large-looming absence of the high school, which Updike introduces as a kind of social laboratory or rehearsal space. This function is traceable in various of Updike’s unpublished juvenilia as well as the mythological high-school novel The Centaur. The second section of this essay discusses the strained relationship between Rabbit and his son Nelson, focusing on the bildungsroman topos of generational fears of epigonism. Finally, I turn to Updike’s often-debated use of an anti-intellectual character, lower than himself in social class and education, as a recording device for the historical era. This direction-based concept of writing ‘down to’ a protagonist is put into dialogue with Rabbit Angstrom’s pervasive ‘down-from’ trajectory, which stands in direct opposition with more conventional American bildungsromane.

[The John Updike Review 8.2 (2021): 49–76]