John Updike

The paper is focused on the literary influence of John Updike’s fiction on Ian McEwan's novel Saturday. Starting with the intertextual relation of the novel with other great works of literary modernism, as well as  McEwan's  own statements about Updike’s impact on him, I  explore both the style and the content similarities. The basic difference  that McEwan's  story is based on is the one between mind and brain, on which he further develops the characterization and plot. It is also the knot between his and Updike’s writing, which points to the profound debt of both writers to the poetics of Henry James, Woolf, Joyce and other modernists.

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 This function is traceable in various of Updike’s unpublished juvenilia as well as the mythological high-school novel The Centaur.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]

Virginia Woolf set off a storm when she borrowed Coleridge's expression "a great mind is androgynous," and used it as a model for writers of both sexes. Woolf says, "He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided" (98). We will see how gender roles have been represented in a selection of stories from The Best American Short Stories of the Century. How have these stories embraced Woolf's idea of the "androgynous" mind, and how have they served as a commentary on society? How has the short story served as a tool to integrate this idea? We will see a trend develop over the course of the century in which the most positive male/female representations are the ones that embrace Woolf's "androgynous motif" as a model for behavior, and correspondingly, the ones who represent gender separation are presented as barbaric, anachronistic, and destructive. In "A Jury of Her Peers" (1917), we find that the traditional male/female relationship is being called into question because "female knowledge" has been left out of the equation of the Ro chester

I published this story about the death of Philip Roth two years before his death was officially announced by the New Yorker. My narrator got the scoop and I think his version is more plausible than theirs. As far as I know, "official biographer" (a phrase so humorous one would think Roth invented himself) Blake Bailey is unfamiliar with this the first and truest account of Roth's death by his spiritual biographer. Inevitably, biography is gossip. This is truth. The narrator has asked me to post more of Roth's unwritten adventures, including his response to the wrong Jew winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 2017, as well as his afterlife experiences where he has been taxed with manipulating the space-time continuum to save Walter Benjamin from his own hand.  I will as soon as he gives them to me.

Global 64 (República Dominicana). Otoño, 2015.

Tras ocho años en el aire, la serie Mad Men llegó a su fin el pasado mayo, dándole cierre a un ciclo que, durante los años de la crisis económica estadounidense, trajo a las pantallas un retrato de los mejores momentos del país, recordando tanto su cúspide económica como el momento de su refundación. En este ensayo se  argumenta que, al igual que cierta vertiente de la literatura estadounidense, la grandeza de Mad Men nunca se encontró en los grandes gestos, sino en el trabajo que llevó a cabo en los márgenes, en las minúsculas vidas de sus personajes más mediocres.

Culturally-orientated translation studies no longer consider the source text and the target text as purely linguistic samples of language (Ritva Leppihalme, 1997).  In recent decades, the ‘cultural turn’ has established a trend in translation scholarship that regards translation as a medium for intercultural communication. At present, however, there is a paucity of research aimed at exploring the transposition of how characters in a novel communicate amongst themselves, and how their social identity is forged in said communications.  To that end, this paper will carry out an empirical analysis on the John Updike’s novel Rabbit Redux and its Spanish translation, ‘El regreso de Conejo’ (2003, trans. by Iris Menéndez).
Character identities are constructed through various literary devices, but among these, dialogue is of special interest because it is through the graphic representation of characters’ speech patterns that the reader may discern culture-specific idiolects and sociolects. These sociolinguistic paradigms of dialogue translation have always represented something of an impasse in Translation Studies.  This, no doubt, is due to the interlinguistic and intercultural differences that oftentimes lead this type of scholarly work into the vacuum of ‘untranslatability.’  This paper takes the view that the C.S Peirce’s theory of signs, and in particular, his tripartite of signs (symbol, icon, and index) offers translation scholars a valuable methodological tool that can shed new light on the subtle intricacies involved in the process of translating dialogue.

This paper looks to examine the closely connected themes of God’s existence, suffering and the goodness of the world in the work of American novelist, short-story writer, essayist and poet, John Updike, who died earlier this year. The text that structures the discussion is the syllogism he sets out in his semi-autobiographical work, Self-consciousness, which captures the thematic core of so much of his thought on these themes: viz, “If God does not exist, the world is a horror show; but the world is not a horror-show; therefore, God exists”. The discussion interweaves Updike with various other conversation partners, in particular the late cultural anthropologist, Ernest Becker, and contemporary philosopher, William Desmond.

Witch stories are part of American popular culture, and this culture is extremely influenced by a continuing reliance on its past. The modern obsession of Americans with witches, whether real or metaphorical, is related to politics especially when it came to issues of gender politics. This article exposes a modern image of the female character seen from a male author point of view. John Updike, influenced by the changes that happened to women within second wave of feminism, attempted to write The Witches of Eastwick (1984). Actually, he presented women who did have a sort of careers. His witches are professional active and dynamic. What do witches stand for in American Culture? Why did Updike choose to write about women? Why were these females witches and not ordinary women? This is the core discussion of the present study.

U is for Updike, and U and I records Nicholson Baker's admiration for the man and his writing. The psychopathology of his relation to Updike is fairly remarkable, and the book raises some familiar questions about the phenomenon of literary influence. It's written in free fantasia form and it may be an act of love. But it's also highly ambivalent-and astoundingly egocentric. This explains some of its insights as well as its remarkable implausibilities: both are the products of an intense narrowness in the beam of Baker's attention.

This volume includes an interview conducted by Stanislav Kolář, intertextual studies by Aristi Trendel (Roth cf. Updike), Petr Anténe (Roth cf. Zadie Smith) and Christopher Koy (Roth cf. Singer); Mike Witcombe’s analysis of Roth’s complex portrayals of sexual libertinism to David Lukeš and Hana Ulmanová’s treatment of his alleged offensiveness to Jews; and finally stopping with Valerie Roberge’s links to Kierkegaard.

Book published by Palgrave Macmillan in the series American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Can order print copy, e copy, or individual chapters at https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9780230110458.  First Place Winner of the President's Book Award at Texas Tech University.

European Network of Comparative Literary Studies (REELC/ENCLS) 6th Biennial Congress. Organised in collaboration with CLAI (Comparative Literature Association of Ireland)
Themes: “Longing and Belonging”
Places: Dublin City University and National University of Ireland, Galway
Dates: 24-28 August 2015

John Updike’s notorious penchant for using the male point of view should not be attributed to the author’s alleged misogyny; on the contrary, his careful handling of male and female perspectives deserves close re-evaluation. After tracing how the young Updike struggled to incorporate a female point of view in his early fiction and, for a time, settled on employing a male perspective in his mid-career stories of Richard and Joan Maple, this essay revolves around a female-voiced story “Killing” (drafted in 1975 and published in 1982), scrutinizing its publication history and the archival materials associated with it. As a result, we see that the story demonstrates Updike’s successful attempt to explore a woman’s interiority as well as shows an example of his subtle craftsmanship, involving his use of the pronoun us at the story’s dénouement. Moreover, “Killing” foreshadows Updike’s female narratives in his late phase, especially Seek My Face (2002), where the similar technique is extensively utilized to portray two women’s incompatibility and their following reconciliation.

This book explores the representation of terrorism in plays, novels and films across the centuries. Writers and filmmakers including William Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, John Updike, and Steven Spielberg refer to terrorist acts as beyond comprehension, "a deed without a name," but instead of creating works that respond to terrorism by providing comforting narratives reassuring audiences and readers of their moral superiority and the perfidy of the terrorists, these writers and filmmakers confront the unspeakable by attempting to see the world from the terrorist’s perspective and examining the roots of terrorist violence.

"For Herman writers of fiction 'have always offered us the tools for a better understanding of terrorism. We just need to pay attention.' This scholarly, insightful, and illuminating book gives these writers their due attention, and it also shows how the one-dimensional representations it critiques have too often obscured our historical understanding of terrorism, and too often left us dangerously blind in one eye."-Matthew Carr, Infernal Machine 20% Discount Available-enter the code HUM19 at checkout*

Novels bring us into fictional worlds where we encounter the lives, struggles and dreams of characters who speak to the underlying pulse of society and social change. In this book post-World War II comes alive again in an analysis of the characters that captured the imaginations of millions of readers in the most influential novels of the 1950s.

The examination of the revisions that John Updike made to the Olinger stories for the 2003 collection yields a new interpretation of the central character David Kern’s existential anxiety and shows not only the author’s artistic craft as a fiction writer but also his instinct for “self-preservation.”

Co-authored with Laurence W. Mazzeno:  This article considers the central preoccupations and modus operandi of the American writer John Updike as an essayist with personal, autobiographical intent. Best known in the American canon for his many works of fiction, he produced nonfiction in equal measure over the course of his lengthy career. His far-ranging critical reviews and topical, discursive writings have occupied pride of place in the most prominent periodicals of our times and have garnered much critical and popular attention. Yet his specifically self-referential essays, especially those composed in the final years of his life, deserve closer notice for the ways in which they reveal a survival impulse that speaks to the willing vulnerability not only of Updike, but of all who write about themselves.

Il mio Updike cuore stanco di un Coniglio americano Quando muore uno scrittore che ammiri, rileggere i suoi libri sembra un normale atto di cortesia e omaggio. Alle volte, però, è forse più assennato resistere alla tentazione di tornare indietro: alla morte di Lawrence Durrell, preferii conservare i miei ricordi quarantennali di Il Quartetto di Alessandria piuttosto che espormi un'altra volta a tutta quell'opulenza. E talvolta la natura dell'opera dello scrittore comporta un problema di scelta. È ciò che accadde con John Updike. Sarebbe stato meglio scegliere uno dei libri mai aperti (su per giù una dozzina, nel mio caso)? O uno che sospettavo di non aver colto nella sua interezza o di aver sottovalutato all'epoca? O decidere per uno come Coppie , che avevo forse letto per qualche motivo non letterario? La decisione, alla fine, si presentò da sé. Avevo letto la serie del Coniglio per la prima volta nell'autunno del 1991, in circostanze che ritenevo quasi perfette, ero impegnato in un book tour negli Stati Uniti e a Heathrow avevo comprato il primo volume, Corri, Coniglio , in un'edizione della Penguin.

How can literature respond to a monumental event, unprecedented historically, politically and culturally, whose memory will forever be inseparable from its mass media coverage? How can writers represent what Jean Baudrillard called an "image-event"? In particular, what form can they use to convey the unspeakable - that was at the same time broadcast live across the globe? These questions are central to Ewa Kowal's comparative study of thirteen early post-9/11 novels. Written in four different Western countries between 2003 and 2007, during the now historical time of George W. Bush's "war on terror," the selected works provide the earliest literary reactions to the September 11,2001 terrorist attacks and/or their aftermath. Kowal examines them in a wider cultural context, focusing especially on audio-visual media, motifs of childhood and magical thinking as well as the destabilised division into reality and fiction. Offering an original reading of the whole body of work, the author places each analysed book on a scale according to its closeness to a terrorist attack, revealing a correspondence between the distance from the tragedy, the levels of danger and risk taken and the degree of formal (un)conventionality.

Discussed: 13 literary texts, mainly novels

2003
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (American)
Frédéric Beigbeder, Windows on the World (French)

2004
Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers (American)
Claire Tristram, After (American)

2005
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (American)
Ian McEwan, Saturday (British)
Nick McDonell, The Third Brother (American)
Lynne Sharon Schwartz, The Writing on the Wall (American)
Wojciech Tochman, Córeńka (Polish)
Philip Beard, Dear Zoe (American)

2006
Jay McInerney, The Good Life (American)
John Updike, Terrorist (American)

2007
Don DeLillo, Falling Man (American)

The encounter between 79-year-old abstract painter Hope Chafetz and 27-year-old art critic Kathryn D'Angelo in John Updike's Seek My Face (2002/2003) is envisioned as what G. Ephrain Lessing calls a “pregnant moment,” which acquires narrative movement through the constant and evolving interaction between both protagonists. Such interaction gains meaning when explored in the light of abstract painter Hans Hofmann's “push and pull theory.” In the following pages I intend to visualize the women's rapport as the alignment of two lines in a painting moving in different directions as they create a “universe, in motion” (p. 33) within the novel, where old age and youthfulness are part of the same palette of colors. Keywords: Updike,  Seek My Face , aging, youthfulness, painting