Assorted Prose

Assorted Prose PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812983777
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
John Updike’s first collection of nonfiction pieces, published in 1965 when the author was thirty-three, is a diverting and illuminating gambol through midcentury America and the writer’s youth. It opens with a choice selection of parodies, casuals, and “Talk of the Town” reports, the fruits of Updike’s boyish ambition to follow in the footsteps of Thurber and White. These jeux d’esprit are followed by “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” an immortal account of Ted Williams’s last at-bat in Fenway Park; “The Dogwood Tree,” a Wordsworthian evocation of one Pennsylvania childhood; and five autobiographical essays and stories. Rounding out the volume are classic considerations of Nabokov, Salinger, Spark, Beckett, and others, the earliest efforts of the book reviewer who would go on to become, in The New York Times’s estimation, “the pre-eminent critic of his generation.” Updike called this collection “motley but not unshapely.” Some would call it a classic of its kind.

Assorted Prose

Assorted Prose PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812983777
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
John Updike’s first collection of nonfiction pieces, published in 1965 when the author was thirty-three, is a diverting and illuminating gambol through midcentury America and the writer’s youth. It opens with a choice selection of parodies, casuals, and “Talk of the Town” reports, the fruits of Updike’s boyish ambition to follow in the footsteps of Thurber and White. These jeux d’esprit are followed by “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” an immortal account of Ted Williams’s last at-bat in Fenway Park; “The Dogwood Tree,” a Wordsworthian evocation of one Pennsylvania childhood; and five autobiographical essays and stories. Rounding out the volume are classic considerations of Nabokov, Salinger, Spark, Beckett, and others, the earliest efforts of the book reviewer who would go on to become, in The New York Times’s estimation, “the pre-eminent critic of his generation.” Updike called this collection “motley but not unshapely.” Some would call it a classic of its kind.

Prophets Without Vision

Prophets Without Vision PDF Author: Hedda Ben-Bassat
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838754337
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Ben-Bassat (English, Tel Aviv U.) discusses crises of ideology and identity in the fiction of contemporary American authors. She contends that the fiction of John Updike, Flannery O'Connor, Grace Paley, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker has absorbed a diversity of prophetic modes from a diversity of

Something and Nothingness

Something and Nothingness PDF Author: John Neary
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809317424
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
John Neary shows that the theological dichotomy of via negativa (which posits the authentic experience of God as absence, darkness, silence) and via affirmativa (which emphasizes presence, images, and the sounds of the earth) is an overlooked key to examining and comparing the works of John Fowles and John Updike. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of both Christian and secular existentialism within the modern theology of Barth and Levinas and the contemporary critical theory of Derrida and J. Hillis Miller, Neary demonstrates the ultimate affinity of these authors who at first appear such opposites. He makes clear that Fowles's postmodernist, metafictional experiments reflect the stark existentialism of Camus and Sartre while Updike's social realism recalls Kierkegaard's empirical faith in a generous God within a kind of Christian deconstructionism. Neary's perception of uncanny similarities between the two authors--whose respective careers are marked by a series of novels that structurally and thematically parallel each other--and the authors' shared long-term interest in existentialism and theology support both his critical comparison and his argument that neither author is "philosophically more sophisticated nor aesthetically more daring."

New Essays on Rabbit Run

New Essays on Rabbit Run PDF Author: Stanley Trachtenberg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521438841
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Book Description
The essays in this collection examine the technical mastery and thematic range of John Updike's novel Rabbit Run.

Assorted Prose

Assorted Prose PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679645837
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
John Updike’s first collection of nonfiction pieces, published in 1965 when the author was thirty-three, is a diverting and illuminating gambol through midcentury America and the writer’s youth. It opens with a choice selection of parodies, casuals, and “Talk of the Town” reports, the fruits of Updike’s boyish ambition to follow in the footsteps of Thurber and White. These jeux d’esprit are followed by “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” an immortal account of Ted Williams’s last at-bat in Fenway Park; “The Dogwood Tree,” a Wordsworthian evocation of one Pennsylvania childhood; and five autobiographical essays and stories. Rounding out the volume are classic considerations of Nabokov, Salinger, Spark, Beckett, and others, the earliest efforts of the book reviewer who would go on to become, in The New York Times’s estimation, “the pre-eminent critic of his generation.” Updike called this collection “motley but not unshapely.” Some would call it a classic of its kind.

Updike's Version

Updike's Version PDF Author: James A. Schiff
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 9780826208712
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
Although many readers are aware of John Updike's Rabbit tetralogy, fewer have paid close attention to his other multivolume work, "The Scarlet Letter trilogy." In Updike's Version, James Schiff provides the first full-length critical analysis of Updike's trilogy since the publication of its final volume in 1988. He demonstrates how Hawthorne's classic novel of adulterous love and divided selves has become an American myth, and how Updike, in his trilogy, has sought to expand, update, and satirize that myth. The three volumes that make up the trilogy, A Month of Sundays (1975), Roger's Version (1986), and S. (1988), engage in a dialogue with Hawthorne's novel, commenting upon and altering the original story. To understand the nature of this dialogue, Schiff employs a methodolgy specifically suited to Updike's mythical method, in which special attention is given to reader expectation, parody, point of view, and principles of fragmentation and condensation. Updike's Version covers new ground in Updike's studies, revealing how the intertextual dialogue between Updike and Hawthorne is far more complex and extensive than has yet been acknowledged. Providing close and detailed readings of the novels, Updike's Version will be of major importance to students and scholars of John Updike, Nathaniel Hawthorne's canonical American text, and American literature in general.

Becoming John Updike

Becoming John Updike PDF Author: Laurence W. Mazzeno
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 1571135111
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
When John Updike died in 2009, tributes from the literary establishment were immediate and fulsome. However, no one reading reviews of Updike's work in the late 1960s would have predicted that kind of praise for a man who was known then as a brilliant stylist who had nothing to say. What changed? Why? And what is likely to be his legacy? These are the questions that Becoming John Updike pursues by examining the journalistic and academic response to his writings. Several things about Updike's career make a reception study appropriate. First, he was prolific: he began publishing fiction and essays in 1956, published his first book in 1958, and from then on, brought out at least one new book each year. Second, his books were reviewed widely - usually in major American newspapers and magazines, and often in foreign ones as well. Third, Updike quickly became a darling of academics; the first book about his work was published in 1967, less than a decade after his own first book. More than three dozen books and hundreds of articles of academic criticism have been devoted to Updike. The present volume will appeal to the continuing interest in Updike's writing among academics and general readers alike. Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University. Among other books, he has written volumes on Austen, Dickens, Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold for Camden House's Literary Criticism in Perspective series.

UnderWords

UnderWords PDF Author: Joseph Dewey
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874137859
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Don DeLillo's 1997 masterwork Underworld, one of the most acclaimed and long-awaited novels of the last twenty years, was immediately recognized as a landmark novel, not only in the long career of one of America's most distinguished novelists but also in the ongoing evolution of the postmodern novel. Vast in scope, intricately organized, and densely allusive, the text provided an immediate and engaging challenge to readers of contemporary fiction. This collection of thirteen essays brings together new and established voices in American studies and contemporary American literature to assess the place of this remarkable novel not only within the postmodern tradition but within the larger patterns of American literature and culture as well. By seeking to place the novel within such a context, this lively collection of provocative readings offers a valuable guide for both students and scholars of the American literary imagination.

The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov

The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov PDF Author: Vladimir E. Alexandrov
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136601570
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 849

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Book Description
First published in 1995. This companion constitutes a virtual encyclopaedia of Nabokov, and occupies a unique niche in scholarship about him. Articles on individual works by Nabokov, including his short stories and poetry, provide a brief survey of critical reactions and detailed analyses from diverse vantage points. For anyone interested in Nabokov, from scholars to readers who love his works, this is an ideal guide. Its chronology of Nabokov's life and works, bibliographies of primary and secondary works, and a detailed index make it easy to find reliable information any aspect of Nabokov's rich legacy.

The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen

The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen PDF Author: Peter J. Bailey
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813167698
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 451

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Book Description
For five decades, no American filmmaker has been as prolific—or as paradoxical—as Woody Allen. From Play It Again, Sam (1972) to Midnight in Paris (2011) and Blue Jasmine (2013), Allen has produced an average of one film a year; yet in many of these movies Allen reveals a progressively skeptical attitude toward both the value of art and the cultural contributions of artists. In this second edition Peter J. Bailey extends his classic study to consider Allen's work during the twenty-first century. He illuminates how the director's decision to leave New York to shoot in European cities such as London, Paris, Rome, and Barcelona has affected his craft. He also explores Allen's shift toward younger actors and interprets the evolving critical reaction to his films—authoritatively demonstrating why the director's lifelong project of moviemaking remains endlessly deserving of careful attention.