Category Archives: Scholarship & Analysis

New Updike monograph by Fromer now available for pre-order

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The Moderate Imagination: The Political Thought of John Updike and the Decline of New Deal Liberalism, a monograph by John Updike Society member Yoav Fromer, is now available for pre-orders at Amazon.com.

Scheduled for June 12, 2020 publication by the University Press of Kansas, the new critical work on Updike is 288 pages, hardcover, and priced at $39.95.  Here’s the description:

“In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, Americans finally faced a perplexing political reality: Democrats, purported champions of working people since the New Deal, had lost the white, working-class voters of Middle America. For answers about how this could be, Yoav Fromer turns to an unlikely source: the fiction of John Updike. Though commonly viewed as an East Coast chronicler of suburban angst, the gifted writer (in fact a native of the quintessential rust-belt state, Pennsylvania) was also an ardent man of ideas, political ideas—whose fiction, Fromer tells us, should be read not merely as a reflection of the postwar era, but rather as a critical investigation into the liberal culture that helped define it.

“Several generations of Americans since the 1960s have increasingly felt ‘left behind.’ In Updike’s early work, Fromer finds a fictional map of the failures of liberalism that might explain these grievances. The Moderate Imagination also taps previously unknown archival materials and unread works from his college years at Harvard to offer a clearer view of the author’s acute political thought and ideas. Updike’s prescient literary imagination, Fromer shows, sensed the disappointments and alienation of rural white working- and middle-class Americans decades before conservatives sought to exploit them. In his writing, he traced liberalism’s historic decline to its own philosophical contradictions rather than to only commonly cited external circumstances like the Vietnam War, racial strife, economic recession, and conservative backlash.

“A subtle reinterpretation of John Updike’s legacy, Fromer’s work complicates and enriches our understanding of one of the twentieth century’s great American writers—even as the book deftly demonstrates what literature can teach us about politics and history.”

Belgrade BELLS features three Updike essays

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Radojka Vukčević, the editor of the peer-reviewed Belgrade English Language & Literature Studies, attended the 5th John Updike Society Conference in Serbia and was impressed with the quality of papers presented, just as members were impressed by Belgrade BELLS. Three of those conference papers were recently published in Volume 11 (2019):

—”Recreation of the Second Degree: Updike’s Shakespeare in Translation,” by Alexander Shurbanov
—”John Updike’s The Centaur and the Artist Divided,” by James Plath
—”Psychic Sexuality: Memory and Dream in John Updike’s Villages,” by Pradipta Sengupta

Writer Jill McCorkle picks Updike story for Why I Like This Story

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Jackson R. Bryer has edited a fun collection of essays by contemporary short story writers who pick a favorite story and explain why. Jill McCorkle chose John Updike’s short story “Flight.”

Here is the Boydell and Brewer catalog description for the volume, which will be published in June 2019:

Presents essays by leading short-story writers on their favorite American short stories and why they like them. It will send readers to the library or bookstore to read – or re-read – the stories selected.

On the assumption that John Updike was correct when he asserted, in a 1978 letter to Joyce Carol Oates, that “Nobody can read like a writer,” Why I Like This Story presents brief essays by forty-eight leading American writers on their favorite American short stories, explaining why they like them. The essays, which are personal, not scholarly, not only tell us much about the story selected, they also tell us a good deal about the author of the essay, about what elements of fiction he or she values.

Among the writers whose stories are discussed are such American masters as James, Melville, Hemingway, O’Connor, Fitzgerald, Porter, Carver, Wright, Updike, Bellow, Salinger, Malamud, and Welty; but the book also includes pieces on stories by canonical but lesser-known practitioners such as Andre Dubus, Ellen Glasgow, Kay Boyle, Delmore Schwartz, George Garrett, Elizabeth Tallent, William Goyen, Jerome Weidman, Peter Matthiessen, Grace Paley, William H. Gass, and Jamaica Kincaid, and relative newcomers such as Lorrie Moore, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Phil Klay, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Edward P. Jones. Why I Like This Story will send readers to the library or bookstore to read or re-read the stories selected.

Among the contributors to the book are Julia Alvarez, Andrea Barrett, Richard Bausch, Ann Beattie, Andre Dubus, George Garrett, William H. Gass, Julia Glass, Doris Grumbach, Jane Hamilton, Jill McCorkle, Alice McDermott, Clarence Major, Howard Norman, Annie Proulx, Joan Silber, Elizabeth Spencer, and Mako Yoshikawa.

Editor Jackson R. Bryer is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Maryland.


Papers on Updike presented at Russia conference

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Two papers on John Updike were presented at the Fourth International Conference on “National Myth in Literature and Culture” hosted by Kazan Federal University in Russia, May 6-7.

Professor Olga Karasik’s paper, “Russia through the Eyes of American Author: John Updike’s ‘Rich in Russia,'” focused on the mythologizing of the image of the Soviet Union, and Ph.D. student Olga Shalagina’s paper, “The Image of Terrorist in John Updike’s Terrorist,” was devoted to the image of the terrorist as “other.”

Published: “Black Activism: John Updike”

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It has come to our attention that the critical essay “Black Activism: John Updike” by Suchitra Vashisth, an assistant professor at DIT University, Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India, was published last year in the International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences (Vol. 3, Issue 1; Jan.-Feb. 2018).

“As a a literary artist, he has given us most powerful expression of the American racist society,” Vashisth writes, adding that “Rabbit Redux contains the story of the black revolution in America in the nineteen sixties. Updike reveals, through the speeches of Skeeter, black revolutionary, social injustices with the blacks in American society” and paraphrasing Richard Locke’s assessment that “the wide range of tones and rhythms in black speech has never been so well produced in contemporary white writing.”

Vashisth concludes, “The remarkable thing which is depicted here in this novel is a white failure of nerves or at least a flagging sense of white identity in the face of black assertiveness.”

Here is the link to the entire essay.


Scholar takes Updike to task for his portrayal of Islamism in Terrorist

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Updike’s portrayal of Islamism in Terrorist has generally been praised, but a dissenting voice appears in “The (Mis)Representation of Islam in John Updike’s Terrorist,” a critique by research scholar Abdul Haseeb, Dept. of English and Modern European Languages, University of Lucknow, Lucknow, U.P. India that was published in IJELLH, the International Journal of English Language, Literature in Humanities.

His abstract:

In the post 9/11 literary scene there occurred an increased number of publications of novels that discussed the various types of Islamism (Political Islam) and have explored the complex relationship between the West, which is proud of having a secular world, and the East, especially the Muslim world, accused of fostering religious terrorism against the secular world. It is not surprising to find a long list of such novels as it is the general perception that the 9/11 attacks are the outcome of the complex relationship between the West and the Muslim world. These novels pick Islam as their subject showing its implications on both the people of the West and the Muslims themselves who are introducing Islam to the West, or they choose one or a group of Muslim youths who carry a fundamentalist ideology of their religion and dare to counteract the godless, materialistic West. The present paper is a modest attempt to expose how John Updike’s Terrorist (2006) has projected Islam as the root-cause of terrorism and its teachings as the springhead of extremist ideology.

Here is the link to a link to view the full paper.

Al-Ustath publishes Islamist critique-analysis of Updike’s ‘Terrorist’

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The refereed academic journal Al-Ustath, sponsored by the University of Baghdad, recently published an “Islamist Critique of American Society: An Analysis of John Updike’s Terrorist and Mohsin Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist,“ by Assistant Professor Azhar Hameed and Assistant Lecturer Afrah And Al-Jabbar.

Abstract:
In this paper, I will show how the American writer John Updike (1932-2009) and the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid (1971- ) criticize the American society. They push their readers to think hard about America’s culture and place in the world. They both encourage the readers to a more extensive understanding of terrorism in the post–9/11 era , and they refuse to put all the blame on the shoulders of the terrorists. They narrate the justifications for terror in ways that invite, if not sympathy, then understanding. In this paper, I will demonstrate how both Hamid and Updike allow for a broader, and more troubling understanding of Islamic terrorism in a time when every attempt to know how the terrorist thinks and lives was considered abomination. They argue that understanding the motivations and causes of terrorism helps to frame a comprehensive counterterrorism strategy. I have made a selection of two novels by those two culturally different writers and emphasized their similar attack of the American society.

A full-text PDF of the article is available through the link above.

New scholarly work considers the pursuit of paradise in Updike’s work

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The 2016 (Vol. 13:3) issue of CS Canada’s Studies in Literature and Language features an essay on Updike by Quingzheng Liu, “Paradise Pursuit in John Updike’s Works.” 

Abstract: 
“In the “Rabbit” series and The Centaur, the disappearance of human ideal world and unpleasant work and daily life are revealed from different angles by the author Updike, in which their protagonists have been always pursuing an ideal, in order to get rid of the mediocrity and depression in their daily life. In this paper, the author discusses the thoughts and feelings towards the pursuit of human paradise.”

Poker faces: fiction writers who knew how to deal

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Writing for Poker News, Martin Harris compiled a fun article on “Poker & Pop Culture: Fiction Writers Finding Truth in the Cards.” In it, he highlights stories by William Melvin Kelley, Joyce Carol Oates, and John Updike—the latter, under the heading “Poker as an Escape (For a While, Anyway).”

“Best remembered for a quartet of novels (plus one novella) tracing the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, starting with 1960’s Rabbit, Run, John Updike penned more than 20 novels, hundreds of short stories, several books of poetry, and a significant amount of literary criticism and essays. Like both Kelley and Oates, Updike is often praised for his descriptive powers and ability to portray characters and scenes in affecting ways, providing genuinely deep insight into our existence when his plots involve relatively ordinary, ‘day-to-day’ scenes and situations.

“Updike’s story ‘Poker Night’ (published in Esquire in 1984 and later collected in Trust Me) presents an unnamed, middle-aged male narrator living a very familiar, not too remarkable-seeming existence. He’s married with two children (now grown), has worked many years at ‘the plant,’ and for three decades has been part of an every-other-Wednesday poker game.

“After working late one Wednesday the narrator has a doctor’s appointment from which he goes straight to the poker game. However, on this day the doctor introduces a disruption to the man’s routine. The diagnosis isn’t specified, but talk of chemotherapy and treatments makes it clear enough the man has cancer, and that his prospects going forward are grave.

“Much of the rest of the story finds the man playing his poker game as usual, putting his diagnosis (and the thought of telling his wife about it) to the side for a few hours while letting the lively card game literally distract him from thinking too directly about his own mortality.

“He rattles off the backgrounds of that night’s players — Bob, Jerry, Ted, Greg, and Rick — giving the history of the game and how over thirty-plus years ‘the stakes haven’t changed,’ remaining low enough to keep the game fun. ‘It really is pretty much relaxation now, with winning more a matter of feeling good than the actual profit,’ he explains.

“The game produces a few interesting hands, including a couple of instances when the narrator believes he made mistakes — staying in one hand, and folding another when only to find out he was best. ‘It’s in my character to feel worse about folding a winner than betting a loser,’ he comments, adding how the latter ‘seems less of a sin against God or Nature or whatever.’

“It’s clear the game is providing a kind of escape for him, and Updike deftly has him recognize a kind of symbolism in the cards themselves.

“‘The cards at these moments when I thought about it seemed incredibly, thin: a kind of silver foil beaten to just enough of a thickness to hide the numb reality that was under everything,’ he says.

“He notices the others around the table, friends whom he’s known for many years, and finds himself recognizing how they have aged. Suddenly he thinks about death again, and earns a small measure of comfort in the idea that ‘people wouldn’t mind which it was so much, heaven or hell, as long as their friends went with them.’ The thought has the effect of winning a small pot, carrying him forward a little further.

“He finishes the game five bucks down, though when he gets home he tells his wife ‘I broke about even.’ It’s a small lie, though it mirrors a larger one he’d been telling himself ever since getting the news from his doctor — namely, that somehow it wasn’t as bad as it sounded, and that perhaps everything would work out okay.

“He knows this is a lie, though. The short scene with his wife confirms it, and the story ends with the narrator recognizing in his wife’s look that she’s contemplating life without him. The description sounds a lot like a player having finally noticed an opponent’s tell, thereby learning something important about what might come next.

“‘You could see it in her face her mind working,’ he says. ‘She was considering what she had been dealt; she was thinking how to play her cards.'”

Harris is the author of the forthcoming Poker & Pop Culture: Telling the Story of America’s Favorite Card Game and a professor at UNC-Charlotte who teaches a course on Poker in American Film and Culture.

Updike scholarship still going strong

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Authors’ literary fortunes seem to rise and fall over time, but critical interest in John Updike has remained fairly steady over the years. Two books were published in the ’60s and six in the ’70s, when his reputation was still growing. The spike in interest came in the ’80s, when 16 critical books were published. The ’90s saw 11 more books on Updike published, and the 2000s another 10. So far this decade 10 books have been published on Updike, with two more forthcoming later in the year.

Updike Society members and Updike lovers are encouraged to ask their public and university libraries to purchase copies of the most recently published books on John Updike:

Batchelor, Bob. John Updike: A Critical Biography. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2013.

Begley, Adam. Updike. New York: HarperCollins, 2014.

Crowe, David. Cosmic Defiance: Updike’s Kierkegaard and the Maples Stories. Mercer, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2014.

De Bellis, Jack. John Updike’s Early Years. Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press, 2013.

Farmer, Michial. Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction. Melton, England: Camden House, 2017.

Mazzeno, Laurence W. Becoming John Updike: Critical Reception, 1958-2010. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2013.

McTavish, John. Myth and Gospel in the Fiction of John Updike. Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2016.

Naydan, Liliana M. Rhetorics of Religion in American Fiction: Faith, Fundamentalism, and Fanaticism in the Age of Terror. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2016.

Plath, James. John Updike’s Pennsylvania Interviews. Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press, 2016.

Rodgers, Jr., Bernard F., ed. Critical Insights: John Updike. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2011.