Updike And Politics

Author : Matthew Shipe,Scott Dill
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 282 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2019-06-27
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781498575614

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Updike and Politics by Matthew Shipe,Scott Dill Pdf

Presenting the first interdisciplinary consideration of his political thought, Updike and Politics: New Considerations establishes a new scholarly foundation for assessing one of the most recognized and significant American writers of the post-1945 period. This book brings together a diverse group of American and international scholars, including contributors from Japan, India, Israel, and Europe. Like Updike himself, the collection canvases a wide range of topics, including Updike’s too often overlooked poetry and his single play. Its essays deal with not only political themes such as the traditional aspects of power, rights, equality, justice, or violence but also the more divisive elements in Updike’s work like race, gender, imperialism, hegemony, and technology. Ultimately, the book reveals how Updike’s immense body of work illuminates the central political questions and problems that troubled American culture during the second half of the twentieth century as well as the opening decade of the new millennium.

Author : Yoav Fromer
Publisher : University Press of Kansas
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2020-05-07
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780700629527

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The Moderate Imagination by Yoav Fromer Pdf

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.

Author : John Updike
Publisher : Random House
Page : 577 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2012-03-13
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780679645726

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Couples by John Updike Pdf

“Trapped in their cozy catacombs, the couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death.”—Time One of the signature novels of the American 1960s, Couples is a book that, when it debuted, scandalized the public with prose pictures of the way people live, and that today provides an engrossing epitaph to the short, happy life of the “post-Pill paradise.” It chronicles the interactions of ten young married couples in a seaside New England community who make a cult of sex and of themselves. The group of acquaintances form a magical circle, complete with ritualistic games, religious substitutions, a priest (Freddy Thorne), and a scapegoat (Piet Hanema). As with most American utopias, this one’s existence is brief and unsustainable, but the “imaginative quest” that inspires its creation is eternal. Praise for Couples “Couples [is] John Updike’s tour de force of extramarital wanderlust.”—The New York Times Book Review “Ingenious . . . If this is a dirty book, I don’t see how sex can be written about at all.”—Wilfrid Sheed, The New York Times Book Review

Author : John Updike
Publisher : Random House
Page : 451 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2010-08-26
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780307744081

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Rabbit Redux by John Updike Pdf

In this sequel to Rabbit, Run, John Updike resumes the spiritual quest of his anxious Everyman, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Ten years have passed; the impulsive former athlete has become a paunchy thirty-six-year-old conservative, and Eisenhower’s becalmed America has become 1969’s lurid turmoil of technology, fantasy, drugs, and violence. Rabbit is abandoned by his family, his home invaded by a runaway and a radical, his past reduced to a ruined inner landscape; still he clings to semblances of decency and responsibility, and yearns to belong and to believe.

Author : Lawrence R. Broer
Publisher : University Alabama Press
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 1998
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : UOM:39015047124022

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Rabbit Tales by Lawrence R. Broer Pdf

In the tales of Rabbit Angstrom - Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990 - Updike's Rabbit, the aging high-school basketball star adrift in the century's confusion, is an archetypal American hero, one strikingly real and individual yet emblematic of his class, his country and his era. Updike's achievements in these novels as poet and historian - his weaving of lyric and epic, of art and four decades of American politics - require that the novels be read on a variety of levels, thus lending themselves to the critical approaches represented in Rabbit Tales.

Author : John Updike
Publisher : Random House
Page : 417 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2012-09-18
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780679645948

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Memories of the Ford Administration by John Updike Pdf

When historian Alfred “Alf” Clayton is invited by an academic journal to record his impressions of the Gerald R. Ford Administration (1974–77), he recalls not the political events of the time but rather a turbulent period of his own sexual past. Alf’s highly idiosyncratic contribution to Retrospect consists not only of reams of unbuttoned personal history but also of pages from an unpublished project of the time, a chronicle of the presidency of James Buchanan (1857–61). The alternating texts mirror each other and tell a story in counterpoint, a frequently hilarious comedy of manners contrasting the erotic etiquette and social dictions of antebellum Washington with those of late-twentieth-century southern New Hampshire. Alf’s style is Nabokovian. His obsessions are vintage Updike.

Author : John Updike
Publisher : Random House Digital, Inc.
Page : 322 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : Egyptian Americans
ISBN : 9780345498755

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Terrorist by John Updike Pdf

Ahmad, threatened by the hedonistic society around him, gets involved in a plot, with reverberations that rouse the Department of Homeland Security.

Author : Adam J. Sorkin
Publisher : Popular Press
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 1989
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 087972448X

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Politics and the Muse by Adam J. Sorkin Pdf

These fourteen original essays on the politics of literature investigate aspects of our understanding of the political muse, with a focus on American writing since World War II. Essays include: "American Literature, Politics, and the Last Good War," "The Literary Art of the Hollywood Ten," "The Plight of the Left-Wing Screenwriter," and "Amiri Baraka and the Politics of Popular Culture."

Author : Nicholson Baker
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 194 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 1992-02-04
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780679735755

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U and I by Nicholson Baker Pdf

Baker muses on the creative process via his obsession with John Updike.

Author : John Updike
Publisher : Random House
Page : 929 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2009-02-19
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780307488398

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More Matter by John Updike Pdf

In this collection of nonfiction pieces, John Updike gathers his responses to nearly two hundred invitations into print, each “an opportunity to make something beautiful, to find within oneself a treasure that would otherwise remain buried.” Introductions, reviews, and humorous essays, paragraphs on New York, religion, and lust—here is “more matter” commissioned by an age that, as the author remarks in his Preface, calls for “real stuff . . . not for the obliquities and tenuosities of fiction.” Still, the novelist’s shaping hand, his gift for telling detail, can be detected in many of these literary considerations. Books by Edith Wharton, Dawn Powell, John Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov are incisively treated, as are biographies of Isaac Newton, Abraham Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth II, and Helen Keller. As George Steiner observed, Updike writes with a “solicitous, almost tender intelligence. The critic and the poet in him . . . are at no odds with the novelist; the same sharpness of apprehension bears on the object in each of Updike’s modes.”

Author : John Wilkes Richmond
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 24 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 1847
Category : Rhode Island
ISBN : HARVARD:HXT8RK

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Facts Relative to the Political and Moral Claims of Wilkins Updike, for the Support of the Whig Electors of the Western District by John Wilkes Richmond Pdf

Author : John Updike
Publisher : Random House
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2007-12-18
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780307417640

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Villages by John Updike Pdf

A delightful, witty, passionate novel that follows its hero from the Depression era to the early twenty-first century—from a master of American letters and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. John Updike’s twenty-first novel, a bildungsroman, follows Owen Mackenzie from his birth in the semi-rural Pennsylvania town of Willow to his retirement in the rather geriatric community of Haskells Crossing, Massachusetts. In between these two settlements comes Middle Falls, Connecticut, where Owen, an early computer programmer, founds with a partner, Ed Mervine, the successful firm of E-O Data, which is housed in an old gun factory on the Chunkaunkabaug River. Owen’s education (Bildung) is not merely technical but liberal, as the humanity of his three villages, especially that of their female citizens, works to disengage him from his youthful innocence. As a child he early felt an abyss of calamity beneath the sunny surface quotidian, yet also had a dreamlike sense of leading a charmed existence. The women of his life, including his wives, Phyllis and Julia, shed what light they can. At one juncture he reflects, “How lovely she is, naked in the dark! How little men deserve the beauty and mercy of women!” His life as a sexual being merges with the communal shelter of villages: “A village is woven of secrets, of truths better left unstated, of houses with less window than opaque wall.” This delightful, witty, passionate novel runs from the Depression era to the early twenty-first century.

Author : John Updike
Publisher : Penguin UK
Page : 144 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2007-08-30
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780141912516

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Of the Farm by John Updike Pdf

Of the Farm recounts Joey Robinson's visit to the farm where he grew up and where his mother now lives alone. Accompanied by his newly acquired second wife, Peggy, and an eleven-year-old stepson, Joey spends three days reassessing and evaluating the course his life has run. But for Joey and Peggy, the delicate balance of love and sex is threatened by a dangerous new awareness.

Author : John Updike
Publisher : Random House
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2012-09-18
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780679645764

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Pigeon Feathers by John Updike Pdf

When this classic collection of stories first appeared—in 1962, on the author’s thirtieth birthday—Arthur Mizener wrote in The New York Times Book Review: “Updike is a romantic [and] like all American romantics, that is, he has an irresistible impulse to go in memory home again in order to find himself. . . . The precise recollection of his own family-love, parental and marital, is vital to him; it is the matter in which the saving truth is incarnate. . . . Pigeon Feathers is not just a book of very brilliant short stories; it is a demonstration of how the most gifted writer of his generation is coming to maturity; it shows us that Mr. Updike’s fine verbal talent is no longer pirouetting, however gracefully, out of a simple delight in motion, but is beginning to serve his deepest insight.”

Author : John Updike
Publisher : Random House
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2012-03-13
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780679645719

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The Coup by John Updike Pdf

A novel that charts the violent events in an imaginary African nation, as told by the colonel and leader of the country—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. "What a rich, surprising, and often funny novel.”—The New York Times Book Review “A leader,” writes Colonel Hakim Félix Ellelloû, “is one who, out of madness or goodness, takes upon himself the woe of a people. There are few men so foolish.” Colonel Ellelloû has four wives, a silver Mercedes, and a fanatic aversion—cultural, ideological, and personal—to the United States. But the U.S. keeps creeping into the nation of Kush, and the repercussions of this incursion constitute the events of the novel. Colonel Ellelloû tells his own story—always elegantly, and often in the third person—from an undisclosed location in the South of France.