JOHN UPDIKE'S
AMERICA
Three Wednesdays, November 16, 30, and December
14, 12:30 - 2:00 p.m.
Lectures by Professor Terrence Doody,
Compass Bank, Second Floor, 2001 Kirby at San Felipe
A Reading by John Updike, Monday, February 27, 2006, 7:30 p.m.
Alley Theatre, 615 Texas Avenue
When John
Updike quit his job at the New Yorker and
moved away from that literary scene to suburban Massachusetts, he set
his task as a book a year. That was fifty years ago and he's done it
- an incomparable achievement for a writer to whom the last half-century
has not offered the spacious temporal field that the nineteenth century
gave Balzac and Trollope. Yet, like them, Updike has now provided, in
novels, stories, poems, reviews, and essays, more than one generation
with a detailed account of the life of their time that few of his peers,
if any, can even approach. He seems to know everything intimately and
writes like the "Archangel" in Pigeon Feathers, whose"pleasures"
are as specific as they are everlasting.”
To read an interview with John Updike,
please click here.
Terrence
Doody, professor of English at Rice University,
will prepare us for John Updike's visit by discussing three of Updike's
novels in the fall and three in the spring. This fall we will cover
Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories; Rabbit, Run;
and Couples (in this order). We will study the next three novels
(to be announced) in January and February of the spring semester.
At the first class, participants may reserve, for a small additional
charge, a ticket to the reading by John Updike, part of the Margarett
Root Brown Inprint Reading Series at the Alley Theatre.
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