36. Творчество Дж.Апдайка

John Updike (1932- ) 


John Updike is regarded as a writer of manners with his suburban settings, domestic themes, reflections of ennui and wistfulness, and, particularly, his fictional locales on the eastern seaboard, in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Updike is best known for his four Rabbit books, depictions of the life of a man -- Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom -- through the ebbs and flows of his existence across four decades of American social and political history. Rabbit, Run (1960) is a mirror of the 1950s, with Angstrom an aimless, disaffected young husband. Rabbit Redux (1971) -- spotlighting the counterculture of the 1960s -- finds Angstrom still without a clear goal or purpose or viable escape route from mundaneness. In Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Harry has become prosperous through an inheritance against the landscape of the wealthy self-centeredness of the 1970s, as the Vietnam era wanes. The final volume, Rabbit at Rest (1990), glimpses Angstrom's reconciliation with life, and inadvertent death, against the backdrop of the 1980s. 
Among Updike's other novels are The Centaur (1963), Couples (1968), and Bech: A Book (1970). He possesses the most brilliant style of any writer today, and his short stories offer scintillating examples of its range and inventiveness. Collections include The Same Door (1959), The Music School (1966), Museums and Women (1972), Too Far To Go (1979), and Problems (1979). He has also written several volumes of poetry and essays. 


37. Творчество Дж.Барта

POSTMODERNISM

John Barth (1930-) is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist (post–World War II era) quality of his work.

The Floating Opera (1956)

The End of the Road (1958)

The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)

Lost in the Funhouse (1968)

1) According to Barth language is material. Because somehow we don’t want to be reminded that a story is in material container. But Barth invites a reader to do this.

2) Narrative has a form. It can be constructed, built. It’s like a craft project.

So the stories are a craft that get built of a material of language.

3) Form is both endless and closed. It is both repetitious and endlessly filled with possibility, because when you read this you get to know that a beginning is repeated over and over again. It gives you that feeling of possibility. But it’s also boring. It doesn’t tell us anything. John Barth runs a certain kind of risk into his story collection, it’s the rusk of difficulty.

Some stories are conscientiously boringly metafictional. The sound like all those stories we have about somebody writing a story about themselves, about themselves writing a story and etc. And it’s all about that endless regress.

4) Language is also unpredictable.

So the language can be separated from people.

38. Творчество Дж.Гарднера

John Gardner (1933 – 1982) was an American novelist, essayist, literary critic and university professor. He is perhaps most noted for his novel Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf myth from the monster's point of view.

A prolific and popular novelist, Gardner used a realistic approach but employed innovative techniques -- such as flashbacks, stories within stories, retellings of myths, and contrasting stories -- to bring out the truth of a human situation. His strengths are characterization (particularly his sympathetic portraits of ordinary people) and colorful style. Major works include The Resurrection (1966), The Sunlight Dialogues (1972), Nickel Mountain (1973), October Light (1976), and Mickelson's Ghosts (1982).