John Updike

This research delves into the cognitive approach within literary analysis, focusing on John Updike's short story "Should Wizard Hit Mommy?" Drawing upon Merlin Donald's cognitive theories and Mark Turner's concept of double-scope stories, the paper applies these frameworks to analyze the narrative. It explores how the cognitive abilities of human brain contribute to the creation of art, particularly in stories that embody Turner's notion of double blend, which extends to a global scale. The analysis reveals how Updike blends multiple narratives-those of the father storyteller, the author's own experiences, and the child listener-allowing the emergence of deeper insights into themes of identity, self-acceptance, and the complexities of parenthood. Through the character of Roger Skunk, Updike invites readers to ponder tolerance and acceptance of perceived flaws, which parallel his own struggles with childhood bullying. The child Jo's evolving perspective reflects the development of moral reasoning and independent thought in childhood cognition. Meanwhile, the father Jack's preference for escapist fantasy highlights the uncertainties and ennui of adulthood. The open-ended conclusion prompts introspection on the balance between parental authority and nurturing a child's autonomy. Employing Turner's framework, the paper demonstrates how the story exemplifies blending of disparate conceptual arrays, allowing invention of abstract notions like justice and retribution. This cognitive approach illuminates the deeper psychological truths and "forbidden wisdom" embedded within Updike's ostensibly simplistic children's tale, ultimately underscoring

Embarking on her first novel in 1950 as an ardent admirer of Henry James, Cynthia Ozick developed a demanding theory of literary high art. When she emerged from her self-seclusion in 1964 with her novel Trust and began to publish short stories, her new work was sharply critical, from a Jewish point of view, of the arrogance, vanity, and maddening ambition that drives the creation of art. In the mid-1980s, Ozick managed to resolve the conflict she had perceived between Jewish moral imperatives and literary art. At the same time, as her career was taking off and editors began to request nonfiction contributions to high-profile magazines, she split her writing into two distinct but complementary genres, fiction and essay. They serve two distinct purposes and differ in their poetics and mode of composition. Essays comment on the world, the present and the fleetingness of time; fictions are mind games; they show timeless ideas in action. This article traces the evolution of the split into two genres and delineates Ozick's theory of art.

Only a very few writers have explored the full gamut of middle-class suburb life, warts and all, as John Updike, and even fewer have run the whole gamut of sexual experience as he has. With his avowed preoccupation with the "three secret things" of sex, religion, and art, Updike has examined the single aspect of sexuality through varied reference frames at varying stages of life: boyhood, adolescence, manhood, and old age. If A Month of Sundays and S. offer a ritualization of sexuality, Roger's Version offers a scopophilic examination of sexuality in terms of the sexual phantasizings of Roger Lambert. Updike's Villages (2004) reemploys the use of sexuality on different spatio-temporal parameters, chronicling the kaleidoscopic ken of the old Owen Mackenzie's sexual encounters, reminisced and replenished through his memories and dreams, and operating on his psychic planes. Lured and intrigued by the "monstrous miracle" of sex, Owen experiences a thrill analogous to a conquest in his erotic adventures with a battalion of mistresses, and his wives. And yet his is not a case of gerontophilia, for in his present dotage he is more interested in relishing those libidinal experiences in his memories than in having further erotic advances. Updike deals with Owen's psychic sexuality in an artistic way that dovetails into his present old age. At once a faint autobiographical projection of Updike, and a dim shadow of his early heroes turned old, Owen prefers contemplation of the carnal carnival to direct action. Applying the insights of Psychoanalysis, this paper would seek to analyse and justify the nature of these memories and dreams to suggest how Updike reckons with sexuality with greater

/11 has redefined the world's understanding of the term 'terrorism' and its association with power and resistance. Post 9/11 novels attempt to represent terrorism or rebellions in a new light by investigating the psycho-social positions of the subjects involved in any such cause or movement. Terrorist (2006) by John Updike portrays Ahmad's desperate journey towards religious extremism and eventual return brought by his reconciliation with his inner conflicts. Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss (2006) shows Gyan's inferiorities that lead to the Gurkha Movement, failing his heroic aspirations and bringing him back to his social reality. Thus both these novels shed light on the individuals that get tangled in the false visions of revolutionary or utopian achievements without any real insight and empathy towards the cause. Hence this paper brings these two characters together to analyse their personal conflicts that ignite deviant tendencies in them and their turn to conformity, reaffirming their ignorant and powerless positions in the society that had originally initiated their rage. This paper thus highlights how the 'terrorists' in these two novels end up with an 'inheritance of loss' and nothing else.

D avid's Story tells the story of the former guerilla fighter David Dirkse; Sally, his wife; the enigmatic and physically powerful Dulcie, David's comrade and suspected lover. All along, the struggle was his life and now, after the release of Nelson Mandela and the dawn of the freedom Dirkse fought for, the main character finds himself in a difficult situation. His name is circulated on a hit list of uncertain origin. With this imminent threat and in fulfilment of his need for historical representation he tells his story to an unnamed woman writer. Dirkse and his narrator explore his identity as a coloured person (a person of mixed heritage) and his roots in the Griqua community. The peculiar ideas of Andrew Le Fleur, the founder-culture broker of Griqua identity, resonate in Dirkse's search for his place in the new, postapartheid South Africa. The novel has a fragmentary, postmodernist structure with a complexity of historical tales, imaginary relationships, and a mixture of historical and fictional characters who represent the ambiguities of racial identities and political and social life in South Africa. I've found David's Story a most complex and multi-faceted book. I had to keep my wits about me to tie all your story lines together. I thought it was marvelous. .. . Other people said to me that the book was complex and that worries me a bit. .. . You probably remember the tradition of the Black Aesthetic-writing black-in America? I wondered whether this was a new attempt at "writing black" in South Africa? Not consciously. I certainly didn't set out with a project like that in mindno, not consciously at all. I tell you it was all I could do. People ask me, "Why did you choose this structure?" I didn't choose it. It was all I could do, because the problem came once I decided to have a dual time frame. That's how I've negotiated it. The fact that this novel has a complicated structure undermines the notion of an uncomplicated, straightforward chronological tale often employed by black South African novelists. No, I don't think that is what I set out to do. I didn't set out to do it. In fact, I have to say that I do now wonder if I'm capable of writing a linear, chronological novel and perhaps it's because I'm not capable of doing it. Perhaps that was easier. Because the story is by nature an incomplete story, it can't be told.

In the foreword of Bech: A Book, John Updike’s character Henry Bech gives his creator John Updike his blessing for fiction refuting a curse. In this ‘little jeu of a book’ and in the rest of Bech stories, fear (of alienation, oblivion, castration, the writer’s block, and finally of death) is tamed through play. This paper studies the narrative games and play between character and author in their joint attempt to fight fear. Bech, the Schauspieler par excellence and homo ludens, Updike’s most postmodern character, alter ego and mischievous double, although an amalgam of American writers and fitting in the American literary tradition of play, also calls forth the European play culture.

and I met as participants on a panel. We made immediate plans to meet and have been talking ever since. We both live in and work from Portland, Oregon, which makes it easy to speak in an unhurried way. It's a luxury in comparison to timecontingent meetings via online platforms with most faculty and students in the program who are scattered across the US and abroad. Our friendship grows from multiple shared interests, building programs and platforms being one of them. Lisa's engagement with the program is visible through the workshops she led to kick-off every Summer Residency from 2018-2022. What we hope this conversation will reveal, however, is how her role and teaching put the four core ideas from which the MA in Critical Craft Studies (MACR) pivots into action. To use Warren Wilson College's own educational priorities, this conversation demonstrates the application of those four ideas through teaching. 1 We edited two recorded conversations here to give a sense of how as much as what took place.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

'After His death, God turned into oil, and oil became a surrogate God,' Antti Salminen and Tere Vadén write in Energy and Experience. This essay examines two novels by John Updike in order to validate this startling claim: Rabbit Is Rich presents an intimate chronicle of late 1970s, post-oil crisis malaise. TheCoup presents something like a reverse perspective: narrated from the perspective of the deposed dictator of an African petro-state, the novel satirizes both petroleumfueled American affluence and the futile attempts of a Westerntrained anti-colonial elite to stave off the latter's destructive effects on the local ecology and traditional lifeways. Both novels can be read as a sustained effort to explore the obscure connections between the decline of faith and the rise of consumer culture, to detect the afterglow of a spent religious force in the experiential texture of American society during the age of oil.

Although little time has passed since John Updike's death, one might risk the opinion that if posterity passes a favorable judgment on his fiction it will be due in large measure to his short stories (and, no doubt, the Rabbit tetralogy). Notwithstanding his proficiency in a variety of literary forms, Updike's stories, by virtue of their rootedness in the realities of middle-class, small-town and suburban American life, their imaginative encapsulation of the writer's own trajectory, and Updike's mastery of an enduring form, might well come to be seenin contrast to the poignant verdict reached by Henry Bech on his own literary outputas the masterpieces of his oeuvre that ensure his reputation. 1 While writers are usually aware of their literary antecedents and heritage, Updike was exceptional in his reflection on literatures past and present; in this, there was something of the scholar in him. Where his own practice of the short-story form is concerned, one is struck by the section in Hugging the Shore that is devoted to what he calls "Tales." Here Updike considers, in addition to collections of Italian folktales and the creation tales of the Makiritare tribe of southern Venezuela, the work of Bruno Bettelheim on fairy tales and Claude Lévi-Strauss on myths. Updike's interest in such theoretical works on folk literature is intriguing, as the short story is the most obvious successor to the folktale, due to its relative brevity and ability to be consumed at a single sitting. A distinguishing and, indeed, essential feature of the folktale is the narrative motif. A motif is any element (a situation, action, object, image, experience, place, character-type, and so forth) that recurs in a literary text and that, through its recurrence, is used to support a theme, or themes. A

In the foreword of Bech: A Book, John Updike’s character Henry Bech gives his creator John Updike his blessing for fiction refuting a curse. In this ‘little jeu of a book’ and in the rest of Bech stories, fear (of alienation, oblivion, castration, the writer’s block, and finally of death) is tamed through play. This paper studies the narrative games and play between character and author in their joint attempt to fight fear. Bech, the Schauspieler par excellence and homo ludens, Updike’s most postmodern character, alter ego and mischievous double, although an amalgam of American writers and fitting in the American literary tradition of play, also calls forth the European play culture.

KATONA GÁBOR: A szellemi test feltámadásának ígérete Dante: Az új élet címû mûvében p. 5-22. TÓTH JUDIT: Apokaliptikus testek és terek feminista módra p. 22-37. NAGY MARIANN: "Táncoló nõ az élet" - test és mûvészet a modernségben p. 37-64. KÁLAI SÁNDOR: Venus oszlásnak indul (Emile Zola: Nana) p. 64-75. MOLNÁR ÁDÁM: A test koncepciói és a szexualitás diszkurzusa John Updike Így látja Roger címû regényében p. 75-86. GYÜRKY KATALIN: Irina teste, avagy irodalmi és szexuális szerepkonfliktusok Viktor Jerofejev Az orosz széplány címû regényében p. 86-104. KOVÁCS MIKLÓS: A kert prezenciája Csehov Cseresznyéskert címû mûvében p. 104-122. TAKÁCS MIKLÓS: Hang(szín) és hang(test) A látás és hallás mint a numinózus érzet metaforái Ady és Rilke néhány Isten-versében p. 122-152. BERTA ERZSÉBET: Arché versus artefaktum. Az architektúra dekonstrukciójának kísérlete a dekonstruktivista építészetben és filozófiában p. 152-174. KRICSFALUSI BEATRIX: Testek ritmikus mozgása a térben Töredékek...

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Terrorist (2006) by John Updike has been classified within the post-9/11 novel genre where many American authors depict their counter-narratives to the horrific event of 9/11. The novel revolves around the life of a young teenager named Ahmad and his religious mentor, Shaikh Rashid, who are accused as terrorists. This study problematises the issue of the identity of Muslim characters in facing oppression using the concept of cultural imperialism by Iris Marion Young (1990), focussing on the social treatment of Muslim minority characters in America perceived as inferior to the entire American cultural mainstream. The objective of this study then is to examine the author’s depictions of the American society as the cultural imperialism persecuting Muslim characters. The findings highlight the Muslim characters’ inability to emulate the prevailing American cultural imperialism which oppresses them. As such, the study’s originality lies in the interpretation of the aversive affinity betw...

Despite the diversity of themes Updike numerously tackles in his novels, this paper concentrates on a unique theme, factors driving young men to terrorism whether inside America or outside America. Updike utilizes a home grown teenager, in Terrorist, to present these factors in a democratic country. The factors are numerous and various. For instance, familial factors such as a decamped father and a careless mother have tremendous weight on recruiting a son as a terrorist. Social and cultural factors, such as interreligious marriage, and single mothers are seen by Updike as factors that could rapidly drive a young man to become a terrorist. All these factors can work collaboratively or separately in order to help recruit a young man to commit a terrorist action against his nation and his people. Updike states that terrorism simply starts with the indoctrination of fundamental teachings and then turns to extremism and fanaticism. During such stages, a teenager or a young man inclines to adopting terror and later on develops as a violent person carrying out terrorist actions for the purpose of change. 1. Introduction: Updike confesses that he is "trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being." (Richards, Omidvar 231) Updike, a very well-known American writer (1932-2009), is considered as an author with multiple talents. He is not only a novelist, but a poet, a short story writer, an art critic, and a literary critic as well. This variety of talents has represented some type of real and authentic taste and richness in his life career as an author. In addition, this variety of art genres has extended to the themes Updike introduced in his diverse and rich writings. Updike's principal themes vary from religion, sex, consumerism and America to death as well. Naturally, the themes of terrorism, fundamentalism, ethnicity and jihad are connected to those of death and religion by one means or another. These various themes are well represented in Updike's Terrorist (2006). In his interview John Updike: Holy terror, Mudge argues that, in Terrorist, "Updike has often explored themes of religious faith and disillusionment. He links those themes to the legacy of fanatical violence." (Mudge 1) Housing such themes, the novel introduces numerous subthemes. Those themes have rendered the main theme support and strength that have continuously added to the popularity of Updike and his works. As aforementioned, Updike, being concerned with themes such as death, religion, war, and America, will consequently be involved in the theme of terrorism. In her Redefining Secularism: An Analysis of John Updike's Terrorist and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist as Post-9/11 Novels, Sheela sees Terrorist as "a departure from his usual themes, which include the cultural, socio political and religious history of the United States." (Sheela 80). Naturally, it is plausible, reasonable and convincing that the theme of terrorism is to the point and is strongly related to Updike's common themes. In this novel, he takes the reader into the heart and mind of family, friends and even the decamped father of a terrorist. For instance, Ahmad represents a homegrown threat to the security of homeland society. Haunted

This paper provides a close reading of a representative selection of suburban poems by the American writer John Updike (1932–2009). It also draws upon the existing scholarship by suburban studies historians (including Kenneth Jackson, Dolores Hayden, John Archer, and James Howard Kunstler), who have argued for the cultural importance of American suburbia in fostering identity, and develops the argument by literary critics including Jo Gill, Peter Monacell, and Robert von Hallberg, who have championed the existence of a viable suburban tradition in postwar American poetry. By scrutinizing poems from Updike’s early poetry, represented by “Shillington”, up to his closing lyric opus, “Endpoint”, the paper argues that Updike’s unrecognized importance is that of a major postwar poet whose lyric work chronicles, in memorable, diverse, and important ways, the construction of individual identity within suburbia, in a dominant setting for most Americans from the 1950s up to the present.

Questions of gender, ethnicity and sexuality have all been raised by novelists intent on rewriting Shakespeare from the position of what have been seen as cultural margins. While discussions of such rewritings are ongoing, few concerted efforts have been made to trace a pattern in the treatment of Shakespearean allusion and adaptation at the hands of British and American writers of the literary mainstream. The present essay sets out to investigate the way in which three such writers —Ian McEwan, Graham Swift, and John Updike— employ allusion to/adaptations of Hamlet in their novels and what their respective stances reveal about their understanding of their role as canonical writers.

This paper examines Bech's trajectory as a fictional character and as an artificerof words. Bech, the word master, is "reduced" throughout the novel in the several oeuvres which try to capture his essence until finally he enters the "heaven of fiction," the ultímate reduction which fixes him as an immortal, immutable character. Bech, however, longs for the mortality of life outside the pantheon, for the unlimited possibilities of reality. Is there no change in paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs Hang always heavily in that perfect sky ... ?

Straipsnyje apžvelgiama tragiško įvykio JAV istorijoje (2001 m. rugsėjo vienuoliktosios) įtaka amerikiečių literatūrai. Ši tragedija šalyje sukėlė ilgalaikį potrauminį efektą, paskatinusį amerikiečių rašytojus rinktis terorizmo apraiškų temas. Vienas jų, John Updike (g. 1932), priskiriamas prie amerikiečių rašytojų, analizuojančių individo būklę, moralinių vertybių paieškas. Savo romanuose John Updike aprašo šiuolaikinio gyvenimo ypatumus, psichologines traumas, žmonijos žiaurumą, brutalumą ir nesuvokiamą blogį. 2006 m. parašytame romane Terrorist („Teroristas“) rašytojas pateikia šiuolaikinės amerikiečių visuomenės, kurioje vyrauja baimė ir įtampa, analizę. Aprašydamas jauno teroristo gyvenimą, rašytojas pabrėžia amerikietiškos visuomenės ydas ir analizuoja šalies politinę situaciją.

In his Preface to Due Considerations (2007), John Updike tells us that when he was a very young man, he yearned to become a professional writer so that his ideas might join the "printed material that hung above the middle-browed middle class in the middle of the last century like a vast cloud gently raining ink" (DC xvii).[1] He remained motivated by publication throughout his life, never losing his desire to see his writing reach appreciative readers. He sometimes articulated how, in his own imagination, the printed wordtypeset and permanentoffered some hope, perhaps merely illusory, for touching immortality. He writes in the Preface to More Matter (1999) that the assembly and arrangement of such a book offers the bliss of "bringing something imperfect closer to perfection," but that any illusion of "permanent form" struggles against the realizations, come upon me late in life, that paper decays, that readership dwindles, that a book is a kind of newspaper, … that no masterpiece will outlast the human race,. .. that our planet is doomed to die in a hiccup of the sun, that the sun will eventually implode and explode, and that the universe itself is a transitory scribble on the surface, so oddly breached fifteen billion years ago, of nothingness. Wow! Zap! Nevertheless, the living must live, a writer must write. (MM xxiii

This article grows out of three of my research interests: the philosophical bases of aestheticlliterary response, a developmental approach to the pedagogical treatment of student response to literature, and the critical theory of Northrop Frye, in whose work the concepts and some of my terminology originates '. What follows is a seque1 to two papers already published and one in press. al1 dealing with the attempt to analyze and systematize kinds and levels of literary response. (...)

In this paper, we intend to examine two contemporary American novels, Lorraine Adams’ Harbor (2004) and John Updike’s Terrorist (2006) with the aim of investigating the Islamophobic irony in their descriptions of characters, views and incidents that are relevant to the Middle East. Our analysis of these novels is framed based on the modes of irony as discussed by Edwin Barton, Glenda Hudson, Claire Colebrook, Ellen O’Gorman, J. Jorgensen, Herbert Colston, Henry Conserva, Ross Murfin and Supriyia Ray. Through our discussions of the employment of verbal irony, situational irony and dramatic irony, we conclude that the two writers make fun of the Muslim fanatics who view the wearer of hijab as a good Muslim. They also imply that the Muslim worldview is one-dimensional. In addition to that, they criticise the US employment of Muslim minorities in places which require high security because the loyalty of these workers, according to those authors, are questionable. In the same vein, they ...

In this paper, we analyse John Updike’s Terrorist (2006) and Mohammad Ismail’s Desert of Death and Peace (2005) with the aim of examining the use of allusion in the depiction of 9/11 acts and the US occupation of Iraq. The comparison of the two novels, selected from two different literary traditions, enables us to explore American and Arab viewpoints of recent history. By appropriating the discussions of Gerard Genette, Michael Leddy, William Irwin, John Campbell and Allan Pasco on the use of allusion in literature, we argue that when authors allude to history in their works, they either employ allusion to affirm or oppose certain notions. In other words, there are two main strategies of allusion: affirmation and opposition. Updike alludes to history to affirm that Arab terrorists are the main enemies of the USA and also to oppose the actions of those terrorists who give themselves the right to kill civilians. In contrast, Ismail asserts that the Iraqi and American people are equall...

John Updike scholarship seems to be thriving. After The John Updike Encyclopedia by Jack De Bellis (2000) another volume of encyclopedic nature has come out this year: Becoming John Updike: Critical Reception, 1958-2010 by Laurence W. Mazzeno, President Emeritus of Alvenia University, whose volumes on Austen, Dickens, Tennyson and Matthew Arnold make his latest one a classic. As its title indicates, the book presents critical reception that covers both journalistic and academic responses to U...

This research paper is an attempt to explore the image of Islam manifested in the post 9/11 American literary contexts, an image that revives in the Orientalist studies that intellectually emerged as Neo-Orientalism. In their discourses, many neo-Orientalists overemphasize a distorted image of Islam as an anti-modern, anti-democratic, and anti-Western ideology that is based on antagonism and terrorism against the non-Muslim Western 'Other'. Consequently, Muslims are distortedly depicted as terrorists who hold a Jihadist agenda against Westerners generally and Americans particularly. These neo-Orientalist misrepresentations of Islam and Muslim have highly affected the post 9/11 American literary canon. Published in 2006, John Updike's Terrorist is considered one of the remarkable novels that centers on examining the nature of Islam and the features of Muslims, within the framework of neo-Orientalism. Pivoting around Edward Said's anti-Orientalist approach, this study ...

This paper analyzes John Updike’s short story “A & P” in the light of Max Weber’s notion of moral decision-making. A prominent contemporary American story-writer and literary critic, Updike has devoted his fiction to subjects' rational and moral problems in the contemporary consumerist society. Updike’s lifelong probing into the middle classes' lives is a body of fiction that raises questions about determinism, moral decision, and social responsibility, among others. “A & P” is a revealing example of such fiction and one among Updike’s most frequently anthologized short stories. The story, titled after a nationwide American shopping mall in the early twentieth century, investigates the possibility of decision-making within consumerist society. This paper demonstrates how Updike’s portrayal of his characters' everyday lives reveals the predicament of intellectual thinking and moral decision-making in a consumerist society and warns against the loss of individual will

In a later story “Bluebeard in Ireland,” the narrator at one point cites Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which fittingly suggests the story’s structural design. However, the quoted line actually appears in Nabokov’s Look at the Harlequins! instead of Pale Fire. This essay discusses how Updike constructed such a Nabokovian puzzle.

Rabbit, Run is a realistic novel written by American writer John Updike, which reflects the middle class life and social background of America during 1950s. And in this work, the author adds some reflections on arts, sex ,religion and existentialism. The character “rabbit” is an anti-hero, whose six times of running reflects the idle and meaningless life of American middle class young men during that period. The paper will analyse the existentialism in the novel and endeavors of the modern people to build up self-identity.

John Updike, one of America's eminent 20 th century novelists, provides his own fictionalized presentation of the Muslim other within the American socio-cultural context in his 22 nd novel, Terrorist. This novel is abundant with binary representations of Muslims whose acts and interactions with fellow Christian and Jewish Americans are scripted by their respective religious values. Updike's exemplifications of Islam and Muslims within the American context are investigated through the problematizing of Muslims' socio-cultural imperfections within the lens of orientalism and psychology of (im)perfection. Imperfectionalism as used in this paper refers to the inconsistent, unreliable and unpredictable characteristics that define the Muslim Other in comparison to mainstream American society. Using themes of 'religious differences,' 'differences between religions,' 'social differences,' 'gendered and exotic differences' and 'optimized differences,' Updike's Muslim characters are presented as flawed and faulty in their beliefs and conviction. In addition, Updike's representation of Islam rests on its blemishes including its disregard for self-improvement and modernity. Designs of orientalism and imperfection as seen in this novel frame the Muslim other as the imperfect version of the perfect non-Muslim American.

In the aftermath of 9/11 terrorist attacks, Islam and Muslims became the subject of representation in the American literary milieu. American novelist Andre Dubus III was one of those who have appropriated the attacks directly by characterizing 9/11 hijackers within his bestseller novel, The Garden of Last Days (2009). This paper sets out to investigate Andre Dubus' III demonstration of Islam and Muslims in line with their association with terrorism and intolerance towards non-Muslims. We also seek to contextualize Dubus' exemplification of the Muslim Other within pertaining geopolitical and Orientalist inferences. As post-9/11 literature has been highly immersed in the cultural, colonial and political ramifications of the attacks, both postcolonial and geopolitical concepts are incorporated into a geopolitical postcolonial approach. Geopolitical postcolonial approach is meant to illustrate the narrative's exemplification of Islam and Muslim in view of the geopolitical consequences of 9/11 attacks as well as the long established Western knowledge about the Orient, Orientalism. Architectures of enmity are the deliberated schemes exploited to shape the other into a differentiated and abhorred adversary to initiate violence against him/her. Dubus' architectures of enmity will be examined within four constructs, specifically, 'hatred,' 'Islamic agency,' 'clashing Islam' and 'Arabic antagonism.' In The Garden of Last Days, the Muslim Other is exemplified as the enemy of the West. Islam is illustrated as an antagonist ideology that leads Muslims to hate all non-Muslims. Through the geopolitical postcolonial lens we expose the circumstantial implications of these representations and relate them to their due context.

This is the first book-length study by a single author to consider the full range of Hecht's production (not actually the first book, as stated in the blurb, since in 1989 Norman German published a work entitled Anthony Hecht). The author is undoubtedly the person best suited to the task. Jonathan F. S. Post is the editor of the crucial Selected Letters (2013), and is also a widely respected Shakespearean and seventeenth-century scholar, which is no slight asset when dealing with so learned and allusive a poet as Hecht. The title of Post's book comes, as he tells us in his preface, from the dramatic monologue "A Transparent Man," in which a dying woman talks about the view from her window, and wonders "how to deal / With such a thickness of particulars, / Deal with it faithfully, you understand, / Without blurring the issues" (xiii). Post declares that he takes this sentence "to be not a dissuasive but a call, a credo, applicable to poet and critic alike, and also, of course, a warning about the difficulty of getting things right" (xiii). Perhaps one of the first things a critic has to get right when dealing with a poet as complex and varied as Hecht (one small example of this variety is the simple fact that in his early books he rarely uses the same metrical or stanzaic form twice) is the structure of the book: Do you follow the poet's career chronologically or do you bundle together themes, forms, genres or images? On the one hand, there is the fact that there is a clear development in Hecht's works from the "highly polished, stylistically inventive" (20) poems of his first collection, A Summoning of Stones (1954; never re-Modern Philology, volume 115, number 2.

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]

John Updike’s Rabbit, Run addresses the human condition under the reign of capital in the context of a society in transition toward a neoliberal state. By depicting a protagonist preoccupied with desire and consciousness through recounting his immediate experiences, the narrative delineates the confusion inherent in the capitalistic state for the protagonist in search of a way out toward self-actualization. Through the application of possible world theory, it is argued that the imbalance between Rabbit’s counterfactual possible worlds and his actual world accounts for the failure he experiences in his quest. As such, the possible worlds’ disequilibrium, we argue, ultimately leads to Rabbit’s bitter failure in his search; too many possible worlds in their counterfactual state produce a kind of counter-reality where there are too many fantasy/wish worlds, but few obligation worlds, a situation that leads to all the inevitable consequences we witness at the end of Book One of the Rabbi...

James Sterba’s restatement of the logical problem of evil overlooks at least one possible theistic interpretation of the divine-human relation which allows for a theodicy that is impervious to his atheological argument which boils down to God’s failure to meet the ‘Evil Prevention Requirements’ plausibly entailed by our fundamental moral intuitions. In this paper, I suggest that such requirements do not apply to God in a world under human sovereignty which presupposes that God never intervenes to change the natural course of events in order to prevent evil or to produce good. Such a non-interventionist (but still arguably theistic) picture of divine providence can be made tenable by the great good and dignity of the God-granted human God-like creativity, including self-creativity, that the sovereignty of humanity over the human world implies (here I take a hint from Pico della Mirandola). Human sovereignty (contrasted with ‘divine sovereignty’) is exercised by humans in common – socially, rather than individually – making the responsibility for the prevention of evil and production of good social rather than individual which poses an additional challenge for Sterba’s employment of the Pauline Principle, especially when the impact of the problem of collective action on the distribution of evil is taken into account. Moreover, the combination of human sovereignty ( and of the social nature of evil make also Sterba’s analogy between the agency of God and the agency of the ideally just and powerful state irrelevant. Such ‘Mirandolian theodicy’ as a God-justifying account of evil sees evil in the world under human sovereignty as an unavoidable side-effect of creaturely imperfection which makes human self-creative development logically possible. It also presupposes a more modest and realistic conception of human freedom than is required by both Plantinga’s free will defence and Sterba’s logical argument from evil and implies an imperative of agathological solidarity between imperfect agents acting under imperfect conditions in order to prevent evil and defeat evil. I suggest that such Mirandolian theodicy may accommodate Dostoyevsky’s social conception of selfhood which encompasses possibilities for the defeat of undeserved evils.

My chapter from John Hay's Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture (Cambridge 2021).

It's the end of the world as we know it
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
And some of these writers don't feel so fine.

But beauty persists.

Do not, I beg you, reflexively spurn the interpretation which my meditation upon these portions of Scripture has urged to my understanding (A Month of Sundays, 46-7). In John Updike's diary novel A Month of Sundays (1975),l the narratorprotagonist, the Reverend Thomas Marshfield, is ordered to spend a month in a desert sanatorium because of his adulterous indiscretions amidst his New England congregation. As a curative method, Marshfield is to keep a diary every day. In addition to this, at his own will, Marshfield also prepares four sermons, one on each Sunday. In each sermon, Marshfield expounds on a biblical text, giving his interpretation or exegesis of it. Marshfield uses the biblical texts as pretexts for justifying his own adulterous or otherwise unorthodox behavior. The sermons and the exegeses also have thematic underpinnings not only in A Month of Sundays but also in Updike's fiction in general, as Robert Detweiler has 2 Robert Detweiler, Breaking the Fall: Religious Readings of Contemporary Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 91-121. Detweiler's account of the sermons in Updilce up to Roger's Version is the most exhaustive one so far. Sermons also appear in Updike's post-Roger's Version output, most importantly in In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996). The sermon scene in Toward the End of Time (1997) somewhat parachronistically ridicules feminist theology. 3 Ibid., p. xv; emphasis in original.

Only a very few writers have explored the full gamut of middle-class suburb life, warts and all, as John Updike, and even fewer have run the whole gamut of sexual experience as he has. With his avowed preoccupation with the "three secret things" of sex, religion, and art, Updike has examined the single aspect of sexuality through varied reference frames at varying stages of life: boyhood, adolescence, manhood, and old age. If A Month of Sundays and S. offer a ritualization of sexuality, Roger's Version offers a scopophilic examination of sexuality in terms of the sexual phantasizings of Roger Lambert. Updike's Villages (2004) reemploys the use of sexuality on different spatio-temporal parameters, chronicling the kaleidoscopic ken of the old Owen Mackenzie's sexual encounters, reminisced and replenished through his memories and dreams, and operating on his psychic planes. Lured and intrigued by the "monstrous miracle" of sex, Owen experiences a thrill analogous to a conquest in his erotic adventures with a battalion of mistresses, and his wives. And yet his is not a case of gerontophilia, for in his present dotage he is more interested in relishing those libidinal experiences in his memories than in having further erotic advances. Updike deals with Owen's psychic sexuality in an artistic way that dovetails into his present old age. At once a faint autobiographical projection of Updike, and a dim shadow of his early heroes turned old, Owen prefers contemplation of the carnal carnival to direct action. Applying the insights of Psychoanalysis, this paper would seek to analyse and justify the nature of these memories and dreams to suggest how Updike reckons with sexuality with greater