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Author Farmer, Michial, 1982- author.

Title Imagination and idealism in John Updike's fiction / Michial Farmer
Published Rochester, New York : Camden House, 2017

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Description 1 online resource
Series Mind and American literature
Mind and American literature.
Contents Introduction: Hawthorne, Updike, and the immoral immagination -- John Updike and the existentialist imagination -- Part I. The "mythic immensity" of the parental imagination -- "Flight," "His mother inside him," and "Ace in the hole" -- The centaur -- Of the farm, "A sandstone farmhouse," and "The cats" -- Part II. Collective hallucination in the adulterous society -- "Man and daughter in the cold," "Giving blood," "The taste of metal," and "Avec la bébé-sitter" -- Part III. Imaginative lust in the Scarlett letter trilogy -- "The football factory," "Toward evening," "Incest," "Still life," "Lifeguard," "Bech swings?" and "Three illuminations in the life of an American author" -- A mouth of Sunday -- Roger's version -- S. -- Part IV. Female power and the female imagination -- "Marching through Boston," "The stare," "Report of health," "Living with a wife," and "Slippage" -- The witches of eastwick -- Part V. The remembering imagination -- "In football season," "First wives and trolley cars," "The day of the dying rabbit," "Leaving church early," and "The egg race" -- Memories of the Ford administration -- "The dogwood tree," "A soft spring night in Shillington," and "On being a self forever" -- Conclusion: Updike, realism, and postmodernism
Summary This book looks past the frequently discussed autobiographical nature of John Updike's fiction to consider the role in Updike's work of the most powerful and peculiar human faculty: the imagination. Michial Farmer argues that, while the imagination is for Updike a means of human survival and a necessary component of human flourishing, it also has a destructive, darker side, in which it shades intosomething like philosophical idealism. Here the mind constructs the world around it and then, unhelpfully, imposes this created world between itself and the "real world." In other words, Updike is not himself an idealist but sees idealism as a persistent temptation for the artistic imagination. Farmer builds his argument on the metaphysics of Jean-Paul Sartre, an existentialist thinker who has been largely neglected in discussions of Updike's aesthetics. The book demonstrates the degree to which Updike was an original and powerful thinker and not the callow sensationalist that he is sometimesaccused of being.<BR><BR> Michial Farmer is Assistant Professor of English at Crown College, Saint Bonifacius, Minnesota.<BR><BR>
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (EBSCO, viewed March 10, 2017)
Subject Updike, John -- Criticism and interpretation
SUBJECT Updike, John fast
Subject Imagination in literature.
Idealism in literature.
LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General
PHILOSOPHY / Movements / Humanism
Idealism in literature
Imagination in literature
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781782049357
1782049355