Blogger contemplates John Updike’s Secular Vision

Posted on by
1

The New Yorker & Me, a blog by a man who calls himself Capedrifter, yesterday posted an entry titled “John Updike’s Secular Vision (Contra Christian Lorentzen),” in which he challenges Lorentz’s characterization of Updike’s art criticism.

“John Updike’s art essays are among the glories of modern literature,” he writes, noting that “Updike’s moments of art religiosity seem to have been most intense when he visited MoMA.”

But he adds, “To say, as Lorentzen says, that Updike ‘never tired of writing about painting and sculpture in religious terms’ is a shade misleading. Only in ‘What MoMA Done Tole Me’ and ‘Invisible Cathedral’ did he do so expressly. Perhaps he sublimated his religious feeling towards art in his other pieces. That may account, in part, for their greatness. But Updike’s sensual apprehension of life (‘Flesh is delicious,’ he says, eyeing Lucas Cranach’s Eve) is also a key ingredient of his criticism—one that’s totally secular.”

Updike and Lorraine Adams considered by international scholars

Posted on by
Reply

The American International Journal of Contemporary Research (Vol. 4, No 3; March 2014) recently published a paper on John Updike and Lorraine Adams written by three international scholars.

“Islamophobic Irony in American Fiction: a Critical Analysis of Lorraine Adams’ Harbor and John Updike’s Terrorist“ was written by Riyad Abdurahman Manqoush (Asst. Prof. of English Literature, Hadhramout University, Yemen), Noraini Md. Yusof (Assoc. Prof. of English Literature, National University of Malaysia), and Ruzy Suliza Hashim (Prof. of English Literature, National University of Malaysia).

Microsoft Word – 9.doc

Abstract
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 ridicule the voices that relate all the problems of the Middle East to the USA. In general, the different types of irony uncover the Islamophobic traits that pervade the two novels.

Here’s a link to the entire paper.

 

Thesis: The Cultural Consciousness of John Updike

Posted on by
Reply

More and more scholarship is making its way online, and another thesis on Updike has come to our attention:  “The Cultural Consciousness of John Updike: Rhetorical Spaces as Representations of Americana through the ‘Rabbit’ Series,” by Michael Bonifacio (Governors State University, Spring 2012).

Abstract
This thesis is a scholarly examination of John Updike’s first two novels of the Rabbit saga: Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux. The discussion is centered on the cultural artifacts and geographic spaces that populate the novels and how they are a reflection of popular cultural and contemporary sociological, economic, and political climates. These items are also closely considered with respect to their rhetorical significance and how Updike makes use of rhetorical spaces to influence his readers. What may seem like ordinary places are, through Updike’s writing, imbued with rhetorical significance that sheds light on his contemporary culture and that of his readers. Updike’s writing over the span of two decades readers provides readers an opportunity to experience culture of two important but seemingly antipodal decades: the 1950s and 60s. Furthermore, by choosing characters that reflect “Middle America” for the first novel and by then integrating characters from the fringes of society in the second novel, Updike shows that he is keenly aware of his changing society.

Here’s a link to download the entire thesis.

Updike mentioned in essay on New Yorker critic James Wood

Posted on by
Reply

In an essay written for The Millions, Charles Finch considers the “genius of James Wood, the literary critic at The New Yorker, and how it influenced the novel I’m about to publish.” But he also references John Updike in praising Wood’s ability to closely read a text and to “re-describe” what he reads.

0312428472.01.MZZZZZZZ“In the last ten or fifteen years precision of language has become the password that marks out serious writers of fiction. (In this respect, though in fewer and fewer others, John Updike’s influence remains enormous.) There aren’t many literary novelists at the moment who are content to be plainspoken, and those who are, Kazuo Ishiguro for instance, have clear narrative motives for the choice. Instead, when you open almost any well-regarded novel today it will have long passages of precisely poetic prose, full of surprising and carefully curated language.”

Finch later writes, “Of John Updike, whom I mentioned earlier, Wood has written’he is not, I think, a great writer, and the lacuna is not in the quality of his prose but in the risk of the thought.’

“The risk of the thought. That phrase has settled in my brain. The Last Enchantments [Finch’s own novel] is a relatively conventional story about an American abroad at Oxford, where he makes a break with his past life, meets new people, and falls in love. These could be the elements of a radical book or a safe one, a good one or a terrible one. I don’t personally think it’s terrible, but it may be safe. . . .”

Here’s the full article:  “Winning Over James Wood”

Amazon book editors pick Begley’s bio as the best of 2014 . . . so far

Posted on by
Reply

9780061896453.jpgThe Amazon.com book editors have released their list of Top 10 Books of the Year So Far, and topping it is Updike, by Adam Begley.

“This biography of the American master goes far beyond simple chronology of this complex (and often paradoxical) character, layering on the lit crit where his real life bled into novels. Detailed and compulsively readable, Updike is essential for admirers, and illuminating for anyone with an interest in literature.”

Digital Book World has the full story and full list, and they quote Sara Nelson, Editorial Director of Print and Kindle Books at Amazon:  “Updike may seem like an unusual choice for our number one pick, but it’s poised to be one of the best biographies of 2014. It’s a candid, enthralling book that readers won’t be able to put down.”

If you’re curious about where Updike ranks in sales, at Amazon it’s currently number 3,209 in books and number 26 in the category of biographies and memoirs.

Children’s book blogger posts Updike-Wilde item

Posted on by
Reply

Wilde - The Young King - 001Yesterday blogger Ariel S. Winter (We Too Were Children, Mr. Barrie) posted an item titled “John Updike on Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Stories,” with illustrations of The Young King and Other Fairy Tales by Oscar Wilde, which was introduced by John Updike.

Winter offers a summary and assessment of Updike’s remarks.

“In the modern age, fairy stories become necessary, Updike says, ‘For if men do not keep on speaking terms with children they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money. This danger was not so clear until machines entered the world in force and began to make men resemble them.'”

Here’s the link.

Telegraph names Begley bio a best book of 2014

Posted on by
Reply

The Telegraph has come up with a list of “The best books of 2014—The must-read novels, memoirs and history books released in 2014 so far.” In the category of biography, Adam Begley’s Updike made the cut with a five-star (out of five) rating, flanked by biographies on Updike’s literary frenemy Philip Roth, T.E. Lawrence, British politician Roy Kenkins, and Karl Marx’s daughter, Eleanor.

“Begley’s biography shows just how closely and relentlessly Updike mined his own life for fiction,” the editors write.

Dybek reviewer cites Updike as a major influence

Posted on by
Reply

paperlanternCharles Finch, in writing a review of MacArthur recipient Stuart Dybek’s most recent collections of short fiction, Paper Lantern and Ecstatic Cahoots, begins by trying to describe a style of writing that he feels is characteristic of the American short story, and credits John Updike for being a progenitor of style:

“For a while there the American short story was in dismal shape. It was never a problem of skill—many of the notable story collections of the 1990s and 2000s were technically beautiful, morally subtle, narratively refined—as much as a problem of tone. The stories that dominated the serious magazines and journals seemed to share a flat fireless quality, something like politeness, perhaps even fear. It was all so tasteful. The sense of drama was minimal. Characters dropped half out of love, or endured a minor crisis, or just wandered around treasuring their sense of dismay about, you know, the fallenness of the world. And above all, of course: that wheedling and constant push toward epiphany.

ecstaticcahoots“I think of John Updike’s 1961 story ‘A&P’ as either the infectious agent or the patient zero of this style. It’s narrated by a teenager working in a grocery store, who quits on behalf of a group of girls his manager is hassling for shopping in bathing suits. They don’t even notice his gallantry, and in the last line of the story he leaves the store, looks back, and says, ‘and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.’

“What a line! No wonder its example has been intoxicating. Its vagueness expresses such a specific ache, and it expands the meaning of the story’s mild events to suddenly and deftly. Writers before Updike had used such a turn—think of ‘Araby’ or ‘The Little Joke’—but his captured some modernist blend of longing, boredom, and elegy just behind the speakable, which has lingered in the form ever since.”

But while, in his Slate review, Finch has praise for the master, he’s critical of the limitations that imitation has imposed on American short fiction.

Read the whole review in “The ‘A&P’ Problem,” published June 6, 2014.

 

Updike letter offered for $4,206.73

Posted on by
Reply

Screen Shot 2014-06-23 at 6.41.25 AMUpdike aficionados were no doubt wondering what effect, if any, the Adam Begley biography would have on Updike studies and all things Updike, and one apparent result of the upsurge in Updike publicity is an inflated price of Updike collectibles.

Case in point: A typed and signed letter from Updike has a price tag of $4,206.73 at Sports Memorabilia.com, where they had better stick to assessing the value of materials signed by overpaid sports stars. Updike would have been amused by the hugely inflated price (and giggled at the 73 cents, wondering if that might be for his trademark cross-outs), even for a so-called “content” letter in which he shares information:

“I can’t claim to be a great Jamesian unlike xxx Leon Edel and the x late James Thurber. I read Portrait of a Lady in New York, on the subway, 85th street down to Times Square on the Broadway line, twenty minutes back and forth, and find I don’t remember much about it. I read Wings of the Dove somewhat later, and the Golden Bowl recently, with great difficulty, xxxxxxxxx straining as I was against his insufferable late style. . . . Where I do admire James without reservation is as a critic—I have the Library of America volume and dip into this whenever I want to clarify my own impressions.”

The market will correct, but with so many letters out there a fairer price would be $400-600—though letters like this do whet the appetite for a second Updike biography, there’s so much more information out there to be gathered!