Category Archives: Society News

Serbian TV spotlights Updike scholars

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RTS, the Serbian public broadcast service, took note of two Serbian scholars of John Updike appearing on a panel at the recent American Literature Association conference in Chicago.

RTS interviewed Biljana Dojčinović and Nemanja Glintić for a segment that comes around the 18:55 minute mark in a Serbian-language for satellite TV broadcast all around the world.

Dojčinović talked about what was covered in the panel on “Revisiting Olinger Stories (1964) at 60 and The Afterlife (1994) at 30: A Roundtable,” while Glintić talked about what it meant for his thesis-in-progress.

Here is the link.

Sylvie Mathé profiled in major interview

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John Updike Society board member Sylvie Mathé was profiled in the series “Persistence of Character — Major interview: Archaeology of a journey” in e-Rea, electronic journal of studies on the English-speaking world. The series, published in French, tracks the breadth of an entire career of distinguished intellectuals, including early influences. An English translation exists in PDF form, but in a file to big to upload and no link to share. Here is the link to a French version online: “Sylvie Mathé: un entre-deux transatlantique (2024).”

The interview begins with a list of career milestones:

1951 : Born in Étampes (91)
1968 : Baccalaureate A (Lycée de Pontoise, Val d’Oise)
1968-69 : American Field Service Scholarship (Rock Island, Illinois)
1969-72 : Higher Literature and Première supérieure (Lycée Fénelon, Paris)
1972-76 : École normale supérieure de jeunes filles (ENS-Sèvres)
1973-74 : Lecturer at Oxford (Lady Margaret Hall and St Anne’s)
1975 : Agrégation in English and CAPES in Modern Literature
1975-76, 1977-78 : Visiting Lecturer in French, Yale University
1980 : 3rd cycle thesis : “The everyday and the sacred in the fiction of John Updike” (under the direction of Jacques Cabau, Paris III)
1978-81 : Assistant-Professor in French, Wellesley College
1981-98 : Assistant Professor, then Lecturer, University of Provence
1997 : HDR (under the direction of Claude Fleurdorge, Montpellier III)
1998-2017 : Professor of American Literature, Aix-Marseille University

Mathé talks about the full trajectory of her career, including the experience of spending her senior year in high school in Rock Island, Ill. “Compared to my final year in French, the amount of work was nothing like it was, nor the demands of the homework,” she told the interviewer. She shared that her host family was “extremely puritanical,” with the mother “surprised, even horrified, that I had read texts by Hemingway, or Sanctuary by Faulkner…It must be said that 1968 in a small town in Illinois was still the 50s. It had nothing to do with what was happening on campuses at the same time, with women’s lib, demonstrations against the Vietnam War, for civil rights, etc.” In summary, “Let’s say that compared to my final year in French, or my life in France, which was essentially focused on high school, work and success, it was a much more varied life, more entertaining…I was doing things I had never done before: I was caught up in the rhythm, I went to matches according to the football, basketball, baseball seasons,” and she dated, went to parties where there was drinking and marijuana brownies, and was generally inducted into American culture.

Mathé’s introduction to John Updike came when she went to Oxford and studied “Puritanism in John Updike’s Fiction” with Jeanne-Marie Santraud, “who was the only Americanist at Paris IV.” She would go on to write her master’s thesis on Updike and compose a monograph for the American Voices series edited by Marc Chénetier titled John Updike: Nostalgia for America.

Updike “knew French,” Mathé says. “He came to France for a few months with his family. In several of his novels, for example in Couples, we find a character who prides himself on speaking French. Generally, it’s very funny because he misses the mark.”

Sue Norton appointed to the John Updike Society Board

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Sue Norton, Lecturer of English in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Technological University Dublin, Ireland, has accepted an invitation to join The John Updike Society Board of Directors. Her appointment is effective immediately.

Sue has the distinction of having been named the first Updike Tucson Casitas Fellow (Project: “Somewhere Between Feminism and Misogyny: Classic Updike on the Modern Syllabus”). Her work has appeared in The Journal of Scholarly Publishing, The Irish Journal of American Studies, The John Updike Review, The Explicator, and other books and journals. She has co-edited two volumes of essays with Laurence W. Mazzeno: Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom: Teaching and Texts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and European Perspectives on John Updike (Camden House, 2018).

“Sue has been an important voice in Updike studies,” society president James Plath said. “She has presented papers on Updike at numerous conferences and has become a valued colleague in the process. Sue has shown a willingness to become more involved and to contribute ideas to make the society stronger, and we’re very fortunate and quite happy that she’s agreed to serve on the board,” Plath said.

Sue came to Updike studies through her doctoral work on family in contemporary American fiction, which she completed in 2001 at University College Dublin. She has been a member of the Updike Society since 2016.

Society member to teach Updike stories in travel course

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John Updike Society member Christopher Love, who directs American Writers in France study-abroad for The University of Alabama, said that he will teach Updike as one of the mid-20th century writers who resided in or traveled in France—a course he said will include James Baldwin and Jack Kerouac.

Two stories that Love plans on teaching are “Museums and Women” and “Avec La Bebe-Sitter,” but he is asking members who have advice on additional stories or have useful knowledge about connections between Updike and France, French writers, French art, etc., to email him (cslove@ua.edu). Since many society members tend to like Hemingway as well, Love added that his new non-fiction book, Crimson Code: The Price of Success, will launch at an April 27 event at a Tuscaloosa, Ala. bookstore named Ernest and Hadley.

Updike panels set for ALA 2024

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Chicago’s Palmer House will welcome back the American Literature Association Conference the end of May, once again opening its world-famous Tiffany peacock doors to scholars from all over the world.

The John Updike Society will sponsor two panels:

Friday, May 24, 11:30 a.m.-12:50 p.m. Session 10-M “Revisiting Olinger Stories(1964) at 60 and The Afterlife(1994) at 30: A Roundtable” (Salon 6)

  • Moderator: Sylvie Mathé, Aix-Marseille University, France
  • Peter Bailey, St. Lawrence University, NY
  • Biljana Dojčinović, University of Belgrade, Serbia
  • Nemanja Glintić, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China
  • James Plath, Illinois Wesleyan University
  • Matthew Shipe, Washington University in St. Louis, MO

Saturday, May 25, 8:30-9:50 a.m. Session 16-J “The Witches of Eastwick: novel (John Updike, 1984) v. film (George Miller, 1987): A Roundtable” (Salon 7)

  • Moderator: Adam Sexton, Yale University
  • Edward Allen, University of South Dakota
  • Carla Alexandra Ferreira, Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil
  • Olga Karasik-Updike, Independent Scholar, Newbury, MA
  • Robert Morace, Daemen University, Amherst, NY
  • Takashi Nakatani, Yokohama City University, Japan

Here’s a link to the most recent draft program.

Technological University Dublin lecturer named 1st Updike Tucson Casitas Fellow

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The selection committee for the John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellowship has chosen Dr. Sue Norton, Lecturer of English in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Technological University Dublin, to serve as the first fellow in residence.

The Fellowship, which will be offered annually by The John Updike Society, consists of a $1000 honorarium and a two-week residency at the Mission Hill Casitas within the Skyline Country Club in Tucson, Arizona. Updike owned and wrote from the Casitas during a part of each year between 2004 and 2009. Located in the Catalina Foothills with a spectacular view of Tucson, the Casitas (pictured below) are owned by Jan and Jim Emery, who generously donated the two-week stay.

Robert M. Luscher, who oversaw the selection process, said the committee chose Norton because of the important contributions that her proposed projects make to Updike studies. During her residency, Norton will work on a critical essay (tentatively titled “Somewhere Between Feminism and Misogyny: Classic Updike on the Modern Syllabus”) and make initial progress on the proposal for an edited collection of essays to celebrate the centenary of Updike’s birth—a volume encouraged by the literary editor at Bloomsbury Publishing.

Norton, whose work has appeared in The Journal of Scholarly Publishing, The Explicator, The Irish Journal of American Studies, The John Updike Review, and other books and journals, previously co-edited two volumes of essays with JUS member Laurence W. Mazzeno: Contemporary American Fiction in the European Clasroom: Teaching and Texts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and European Perspectives on John Updike (Camden House, 2018). Norton came to Updike studies through her doctoral work on family in contemporary American fiction, which she completed in 2001 at University College Dublin. Her first article on Updike (The John Updike Review, 2014) was on the “regulating daughter” in the Rabbit novels. She has maintained an interest in the treatment of girls and women in Updike’s writing and beyond. It is on this topic that she will focus during her residency as the 2024 Fellow at the Tucson Casitas.

John Updike was one of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once. He was also among just a handful of Americans to be awarded both the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal, which are presented in White House ceremonies. He is widely know for his Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, which fellow writer Ian McEwan said was his choice for Great American Novel. Updike also wrote poems, and many of the poems published in his final volume, Endpoint, were written at the Casitas.

Writer-scholar residencies in the U.S. are highly competitive and prestigious. Details on the 2025 fellowship and other grants offered by The John Updike Society can be found here.

Updike Society announces 2023 Schiff Travel Grant recipients

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Every two years, The John Updike Society holds a conference at a site with an Updike connection to celebrate the literature and legacy of the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. For every conference, the society awards competitive Schiff Travel Grants to scholars to enable them to attend the conference and share their work on Updike. The grants are made possible by a generous donation from The Robert and Adele Schiff Family Foundation. Under-40 recipients receive $1500, while the award for Member recipients is $1000. This year’s six awardees are the most diverse that the society has sponsored to date:

Townes Fricke (U.S., under 40) is a high school senior who is applying to colleges and already looking ahead to graduate school, where he hopes to focus on how literary biography affects our cultural perceptions of writers. A writer himself, he wishes to become an academic “without being pretentious about it.” Fricke also will be a speaker at the upcoming Roth @ 90 conference and is currently working on an essay collection on the history of the “Great American Novel.” At the Updike conference in Tucson he will present his paper on “Growth is Betrayal: John Updike’s Work through the Lens of His Peers.”  The title is taken from a line in Rabbit Redux, and the peers that Fricke will focus on are John Cheever, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer.

Nemanja Glintić (China, under 40) is an assistant professor of Serbian language and literature at the Faculty of European Languages and Cultures of the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in Guangzhou, China. Currently he is a Ph.D. candidate whose dissertation focuses on the family novels of Updike and Serbian writer Danilo Kiš—two authors he deeply admires. Updike and Kiš met in Belgrade in 1978, and Kiš was the only Yugoxlav writer Updike read and publicly spoke about. The paper Glintić will present at the conference, “The Nascent Artists: John Updike’s Peter Caldwell and Danilo Kiš’ Andreas Sam,”comparatively analyzes Updike’s protagonist from The Centaur and a character from two books from Kiš’ family trilogy, The Family Circus—the novel Garden, Ashes and the short story collection Early Sorrows.

Biljana Dojčinović (Serbia, member) is a full professor at the Department for Comparative Literature and Theory of Literature, Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade. She has been a member of The John Updike Society since its founding and a member of The John Updike Review editorial board since its inception. A board member since 2014. Dojčinović directed the 5th Biennial John Updike Society Conference (2018) in Belgrade—the first JUS Conference outside U.S. Dojčinović has published seven academic books, among them the first and so far only monograph on Updike in Serbian, Cartographer of the Modern World (2007), as well as numerous articles on Updike, in both Serbian and English. In the paper she will present in Arizona, “Dedalus and Caldwell: Joyce in Updike’s The Centaur,” Dojčinović argues that the Joyce influence in The Centaur extended beyond Ulysses.  

Carla Alexandra Ferreira (Brazil, member) is Associate Professor of American Literature at the Federal University of Sao Carlos. In 2014 she taught at the University of Iowa as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar and later earned a Ph.D. at the University of South Carolina under the supervision of Updike scholar Don Greiner. She is the author of North and South Readings: perceptions of oneself and the Other in Updike’s Work (2018) and various articles and book chapters on Updike and other writers from the U.S. and U.K. She has also advised theses and dissertations on Updike and American authors and has been a member of the society since 2014. More recently she has been working on a book about Updike’s New Yorker fiction and has an essay forthcoming in The John Updike Review. In Tucson she will present a paper on “Brazilians on Brazil (1994): the novel’s reception in the South American Country,” in which she explains why Brazilians reacted as they did and what critics could not see when they first read Updike’s novel.

Sue Norton (Ireland, member) is a lecturer of English in Technological University Dublin. With Laurence W. Mazzeno she co-edited and contributed to Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom: Teaching and Texts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and European Perspectives on John Updike (Camden House, 2018). Her work on writing and literature has appeared in Critical Insights; The Journal of Scholarly Publishing; The Explicator; The Irish Journal of American Studies; and The John Updike Review. She has presented papers on John Updike’s work at several John Updike Society conferences and at two American Literature Association conferences. The paper she will present in Tucson is “Pruning the Self and Asserting Identity in ‘A Desert Encounter,” in which she posits that Updike’s multifaceted authorial presence—celebrated American author and affable American retiree—works to assert individual identity, a positing of authorial presence as a kind of retort to Roland Barthe’s idea of the writer as mere scripter, devoid of true essence.”

Pradipta Sengupta (India, member) is an associate professor of English at M.U.C.Women’s College, Burdwan, West Bengal. He wrote his Ph.D. on “The ‘Hawthorne Novels’ of John Updike” at the University of Burdwan and also completed a postdoctoral project on “Recasting Contemporary America: A Study of John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy” while a research fellow at Osmania University Center for International Programs, Hyderabad. Since then he has published on Keats, Hawthorne, Tagore, Dickens, Frost, Carey, Heller, Yeats, Emerson, and Updike, with his main areas of interest continuing to be American fiction and Indian poetics. In Tucson he will present “Yoga and Tantric Love: Inadequacy and Futility in Updike’s S.” Set against the backdrop of Arizona desert, S. details the activities of a Hindu ashram and its sham hypocritical guru, the Arhat, who expoits and uses the idiom of both Patanjali Yoga and Tantric Love to indulge in his carnal exploits wth ashram women. A close reading suggests that Updike himself abuses the principles of Pantanjali Yoga and Tantric Love, to the detriment of the novel.

2023 Quarry Farm Fellow to write about Updike and Twain

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James Plath, known in Updike circles as president of The John Updike Society and the editor of two volumes of Updike interviews, was named one of 11 Quarry Farm Fellows for 2023. He will receive $1000 and spend two weeks in the fall living alone at the main house at Quarry Farm, where he will conduct research and work on a comparative essay. As part of the process, every applicant needed a “sponsor,” and Donald J. Greiner, Carolina Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus a the University of South Carolina, wrote in support of Plath’s proposal.

Plath described the essence of his project for the Quarry Farm Fellows website: “In 2002, Updike wrote the foreword to the Hesperus Press publication of The Diary of Adam and Eve, and what he said about Twain reveals much about himself and a connection with Twain that has yet to be explored—not so much as a literary influence as it is a literary kinship, a connection with a past literary figure who modeled attitudes and behaviors that spoke to Updike generations later. Updike notes that Eve’s Diary ‘makes a bold foray into female sexuality,’ and Twain seems to have been an inspiration for Updike in trying to write about female sexuality, as the latter does to a much greater extent in so many of his novels.

“Twain also modeled a successful writer who could straddle the popular and literary worlds, who could ‘sin boldly’ in his unabashed writing, who could have it both ways and write for profit and for literary posterity, and who not only embraced but relished the role of writer as spokesperson for American literature, culture, and social behaviors. Just as Hemingway noted a generation earlier that Twain’s public persona was key to the promotion of his writing, Updike too became conscious of Updike the writer as being a ‘character’ he would play in the public sphere. Such is the widespread influence of Twain that has yet to be documented in Updike studies—something that will be rectified as a result of this Quarry Farm Fellowship.”  

Quarry Farm, which overlooks Elmira, New York, was owned by Mark Twain’s sister-in-law, Susan Langdon Crane. Twain and his wife spent 20 summers living at Quarry Farm, where all three of their daughters were born and where he composed many of his books, including Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). A year or so after Twain and Olivia’s first summer there, their hosts constructed a separate study built apart from the main house, allegedly so Twain would have a quiet place to write, but ostensibly because Mrs. Crane did not want him smoking cigars in his house while he worked.

“A smoke-free house is good,” joked Plath, who at one point was compiling a Conversations with Mark Twain volume for the University Press of Mississippi when another book of interviews rendered the project superfluous.

“I’m excited to work on this project partly because it feels like I’m taking up old business, and partly because the house isn’t open to the general public—only research fellows,” Plath said. “I love the idea of living and working where one of the great American writers lived and wrote.”

Updike Society honors two Daves and two Jims

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At the 6th Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Reading and Shillington, Pa., four members were surprised with awards in appreciation for their longtime service.

The board members for this 501c3 nonprofit organization voted unanimously to honor David W. Ruoff and Dave Silcox for their invaluable service. Society members often remarked about the “two Daves” that do so much for The John Updike Childhood Home, and with great enthusiasm and energy, so the awards were “a no brainer,” according to society president Jim Plath.

The first distinguished service award was presented back in 2010, and the sixth Distinguished Service Award was given to Ruoff at the Friday, Oct. 1, 2021 conference dinner. The plaque he received praised Ruoff for “extraordinary docent work and other services to The John Updike Childhood Home.” Plath told the audience that from Day 1, when Ruoff began renting the single-story annex to the house that was built by Dr. John Hunter for his practice, he has been giving tours of the house to people who emailed, phoned, or just knocked on his door. Instead of just admitting them in and showing them around, Ruoff would tell them stories of growing up on that same street and having Updike’s father for a teacher. Some he would drive to other Updike sites in Shillington . . . and even Plowville. And for international pilgrims on the Updike trail, Ruoff would often surprise them with local delicacies like ring bologna and Tom Sturgis pretzels—Updike’s favorite.

Numerous people over the years have made donations to the society based on their interaction with Ruoff, who makes no secret of his love for John Updike, the Updike house, and the society dedicated to preserving Updike’s legacy. Of the 1001 things he does for the society, perhaps most appreciated are the many times he’s had to go down to the house in the middle of the night to check to make sure everything was okay. The building has a sensitive alarm system that can be triggered by very little movement, and it sometimes requires someone to interact with police. Ruoff has done all of that and more for too many years to count, Plath said.

The other “Dave” honored with a Distinguished Service Award—Dave Silcox—has an even longer history with the society. In fact, the details of launching the society were “hatched” in his dining room when he hosted Plath, Jim Schiff, and Jack De Bellis after they all spoke at a Reading Library tribute to John Updike. Silcox, who was Updike’s Shillington contact for roughly 10 years, helped Updike with all things, large and small. He’s done the same for the society, including recommending the right people for the right jobs. But perhaps his greatest contribution comes as a result of his being an avid collector. Silcox has been instrumental in developing the museum’s collection of artifacts and letters, acting as a go-between in many cases. Many of the exhibits currently on display would not have been possible without him. Silcox couldn’t attend the dinner, but Plath presented him his plaque at his Shillington home.

The surprises continued on Saturday night, when Michael Updike and Updike Society board members Sylvie Mathé, Biljana Dojčinović, and Marshall Boswell announced that they had a presentation to make. They told people in attendance that they wanted to recognize the “two Jims” that have done so much to move the society forward: President Jim Plath, for his work coordinating the house restoration and creation of a museum, and Vice-President Jim Schiff, for ten years of service through his editorship of The John Updike Review and the role that he played in securing support from his family foundation to purchase and fund the house.

The awards were framed, commissioned chalkboard slate carvings from sculptor Michael Updike, whose works both Jims have long admired. Plath appropriately received a carving of the Updike house, under which is an Updike quote, taken from the last line of “Grandparenting,” the final story in The Maples Stories: “Nobody belongs to us, except in memory.”

Schiff, who had been tapped by the Updike Literary Trust to edit a volume of selected letters, has spent the past five years elbow-deep in letters. For him, Michael Updike carved a letter slot with letters coming through it, featuring another Updike quote: “Once each day this broad mouth spews Love letters, bills, ads, pleas, and news.”

John Updike lovers urged to shop Amazon Smile

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It doesn’t add so much as a penny to your Amazon order total, and the website is identical. But if you bookmark https://smile.amazon.com and shop there instead of amazon.com, you can choose a charity to benefit . . . and we hope you’ll decide to support John Updike Society and our continued efforts to create a world-class literary site and museum in The John Updike Childhood Home in Shillington, Pa. This is not a gimmick, and you do not end up on someone’s mailing list. It’s the same shopping experience as shopping through the regular Amazon site.

So far the JUS society president (“you” below) has accounted for more than half of the donations that were direct-deposited into the society’s bank account from Amazon Smile. Come on Updike fans and book lovers, we can do better!