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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Townes Fricke <\/strong>(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 \u201cwithout being pretentious about it.\u201d 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 \u201cGreat American Novel.\u201d At the Updike conference in Tucson he will present his paper on \u201cGrowth is Betrayal: John Updike\u2019s Work through the Lens of His Peers.\u201d The title is taken from a line in Rabbit Redux, <\/em>and the peers that Fricke will focus on are John Cheever, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nemanja <\/strong>Glinti\u0107<\/strong> (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 Ki\u0161\u2014two authors he deeply admires. Updike and Ki\u0161 met in Belgrade in 1978, and Ki\u0161 was the only Yugoxlav writer Updike read and publicly spoke about. The paper Glinti\u0107 will present at the conference, \u201cThe Nascent Artists: John Updike\u2019s Peter Caldwell and Danilo Ki\u0161\u2019 Andreas Sam,\u201dcomparatively analyzes Updike\u2019s protagonist from The Centaur <\/em>and a character from two books from Ki\u0161\u2019 family trilogy, The Family Circus<\/em>\u2014the novel Garden, Ashes <\/em>and the short story collection Early Sorrows.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Biljana Doj\u010dinovi\u0107<\/strong> (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 <\/em>editorial board since its inception. A board member since 2014. Doj\u010dinovi\u0107 directed the 5th<\/sup> Biennial John Updike Society Conference (2018) in Belgrade\u2014the first JUS Conference outside U.S. Doj\u010dinovi\u0107 has published seven academic books, among them the first and so far only monograph on Updike in Serbian, Cartographer of the Modern World <\/em>(2007), as well as numerous articles on Updike, in both Serbian and English. In the paper she will present in Arizona, \u201cDedalus and Caldwell: Joyce in Updike\u2019s The Centaur<\/em>,\u201d Doj\u010dinovi\u0107 argues that the Joyce influence in The Centaur <\/em>extended beyond Ulysses. <\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Carla Alexandra Ferreira<\/strong> (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\u2019s Work <\/em>(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\u2019s New Yorker <\/em>fiction and has an essay forthcoming in The John Updike Review. <\/em>In Tucson she will present a paper on \u201cBrazilians on Brazil <\/em>(1994): the novel\u2019s reception in the South American Country,\u201d in which she explains why Brazilians reacted as they did and what critics could not see when they first read Updike\u2019s novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sue Norton <\/strong>(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 <\/em>(Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and European Perspectives on John Updike <\/em>(Camden House, 2018). Her work on writing and literature has appeared in Critical Insights<\/em>; The Journal of Scholarly Publishing<\/em>; The Explicator<\/em>; The Irish Journal of American Studies<\/em>; and The John Updike Review. <\/em>She has presented papers on John Updike\u2019s work at several John Updike Society conferences and at two American Literature Association conferences. The paper she will present in Tucson is \u201cPruning the Self and Asserting Identity in \u2018A Desert Encounter,\u201d in which she posits that Updike\u2019s multifaceted authorial presence\u2014celebrated American author and affable American retiree\u2014works to assert individual identity, a positing of authorial presence as a kind of retort to Roland Barthe\u2019s idea of the writer as mere scripter, devoid of true essence.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pradipta Sengupta <\/strong>(India, member) is an associate professor of English at M.U.C.Women\u2019s College, Burdwan, West Bengal. He wrote his Ph.D. on \u201cThe \u2018Hawthorne Novels\u2019 of John Updike\u201d at the University of Burdwan and also completed a postdoctoral project on \u201cRecasting Contemporary America: A Study of John Updike\u2019s Rabbit Tetralogy\u201d 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 \u201cYoga and Tantric Love: Inadequacy and Futility in Updike\u2019s S.<\/em>\u201d Set against the backdrop of Arizona desert, S. <\/em>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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading