Category Archives: In the Classroom

Teaching Updike in Serbia

Posted on by
Reply

Already in Serbia there is excitement and anticipation of the upcoming Fifth Biennial (International?) John Updike Society Conference in Belgrade, scheduled for June 1-June 5, 2018 and hosted by the Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade. Conference director Biljana Dojčinović reports that a doctoral student of hers “who is also a very devoted member of the organizational committee of our future conference, Nemanja Gllintić, has made an interesting teaching experiment.

“As he is a primary school teacher of language and literature, he lectured at two of his final grade classes (15-year-old children) the story ‘Friends in Philadelphia.’ The reception of the story by the pupils has been fantastic. Everybody read it (it had been translated into Serbian in 1966), did their research, and understood everything about the narrative techniques as well as the documentary elements.

“The teaching staff colleagues that Nemanja invited to be at these lectures where stunned by the pupils’ performance and all the enthusiasm that permeated these lectures. Also amazed were some of the parents I spoke later to—their children made them read the story in order to discuss it with them!

“Nemanje is now writing the report, and there will be a written and video poll among the pupils, which will be translated into English. Right now, the pupils are busy with their homework, which is to write a sequel to the story.”

Call for Papers and Other Fifth International JUS Conference posts

On teaching The Centaur

Posted on by
Reply

A revised version of Adam Sexton’s presentation at the 3rd Biennial John Updike Society Conference was recently published in Issue #27 of Post Road Magazine:

“The Centaur by John Updike”

In it, he talks about teaching The Centaur to the painting, fashion, photography, and architecture majors who were required to take his course at the Parsons School of Design.

“Together my Parsons students and I moved slowly through the novel’s protean first chapter and another psychotic-seeming one in which Peter, chained to a rock, is visited in turn by schoolmates as well as the spirit of the town in which they live. We skimmed the chapter that was undiluted mythology and focused on the rest. The students engaged in passionate debates regarding the identity of The Centaur’s protagonist—was it George Caldwell or his son?”

To make a long story short, Adam says, “They had fallen in love with The Centaur.”

Boston area adult extension course on Updike stories announced

Posted on by
Reply

Screen Shot 2014-01-03 at 11.56.07 AMJudith Wynn, who reviewed several of Updike’s books for The Boston Herald, will teach a six-week course, “The Short Fiction of John Updike,” at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education in Harvard Square.

The classes will run from 6-7:30 p.m. on Mondays, beginning January 13. The main texts will be John Updike: The Early Stories, 1953-1975, selections from the later stories, and Self-Consciousness.

For further information or to enroll, go to CCAE.org or phone (617) 547-6789.

State of the Union at the University of Limmerick

Posted on by
Reply

The syllabus for a third-year course (EH4016) on “State of the Union: American Literature since 1890” being taught at the University of Limmerick (Ireland) requires students to read five novels. One of them is John Updike’s Rabbit, Run. The others are Don DeLillo’s White Noise, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and  John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. No Hemingway and Faulkner, you may ask? Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” did make the syllabus, as did Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” along with short stories from James Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, and Raymond Carver, and poems from Allen Ginsberg and Harlem Renaissance poets.