This is a prose-poem on Updike. It follows Updike through his Rabbit Tetralogy.
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UPDIKE
John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy chronicles reflectively the decades since I first had contact with the Baha’i Faith back in 1953. With the help of a Guggenheim Fellowship Updike was working on the first of these four books, Rabbit, Run, when I became a Baha’i in October 1959. The book was published a few months later in 1960 and is the story of a young man, one Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, from a small town in the USA. The book concerns Harry’s attempts to escape the constraints of life. In my teens I, too, lived in a small town and, although I could see the attractiveness of escaping from social constraints, I also left the need for a set of limits. I was only too well aware of just how easily I could go beyond the appropriate limits. By the late fifties I could see what happened to those who did escape from life’s, from society’s, constraints. I knew from personal experience by my early teens, by 1957, what it was like to be caught stealing, breaking and entering, going too far sexually, misbehaving around the family home, at school or with my play-mates and pushing the envelope of life. Had I read Updike’s book, Rabbit, Run I think I would have had my need, my desire, for limits reinforced. The Baha’i Faith provided that framework, those limits, at a critical stage in my life, my mid-teens. This Faith also provided that sense of the sacredness of life which is at the centre of Updike’s work.
When I was preparing to leave North America for Australia in 1970/1 people were watching the movie Rabbit, Run. It had opened just as I began planning to leave Canada in 1970. Rabbit Redux, Updike’s sequel to Rabbit, Run came out four months after I arrived in Sydney for what became my life in Australia. Harry Angstrom took to the road in 1971 in Rabbit Redux as I took to a different road in the southern hemisphere. Updike’s final two Rabbit books took Harry Angstrom into the 1990s and his rather bleak retirement and old age. The following prose-poem compares and contrasts my life with Harry’s. –Ron Price with thanks to “Articles on John Updike’s Works,” in The New York Times on the Web.
The Rabbits by John Marsden and Shaun Tan is a simple but revealing picture book that satirically depicts the historical tragedy of the past aboriginals during the first and last settlement of the Europeans and ridiculing the Europeans behaviour using animal illustrations. The book is set in an indigenous point of view with the specific use of words and illustrations, as the story is told and viewed by the unexpected arrival of an unknown species called “The Rabbits.” This gives the readers an insight of what the story will be about and by using such illustrations that portrays the two as animals will position the readers into showing the emotions felt by the indigenous and the destructive prowess of the Europeans.
In Reading Tim Wintons hopeful saga, Cloudstreet, you are immersed in Australia; it is an important story in showing the change in values that urbanisation brought to Perth in the late 1950’s such as confidence and pride. But it was also a very anxious and fearful time period in terms of the Nedlands Monster and his impact in changing the current comfortable, breezy system Perth lived in. The role of women changed significantly with more women adopting more ambitious ideologies and engaging in the workforce something never seen before. But most of all it was important because it changed Australia’s priorities as a nation, it shaped the identity of individuals that we now see today, and it created a very unique Australian identity.
During a time of great change, both ideally and physically, in Australian history, a young man by the name of Michael Dransfield made his presence known in the highly evolving scene of poetry. Dransfield was an eccentric character, to say the least, and was recognized for his masterful ability of truly capturing the essence of many of life’s situations. Regardless of the “heaviness” or the difficulties of the subject matter being portrayed throughout his poetry, Dransfield was mentally equipped to fully encompass any life experience and dawn light on some of its “eternal truths” in the world. Although he tragically died of a heroin overdose in 1973 (he was 24 years old), Dransfield made a lasting impression on Australian poetry; never to be forgotten and to be forever considered “one of the foremost poets of the ’68 generation of counter-cultural dreamers” (Chan, 2002).
A work of literature can mean many things to each new reader who journeys into it. Details derived from the text can incite diverse reactions from readers based on their own understanding, age, gender, and experience relating to the piece. This holds true for John Updike's short story "A & P" when looked at through the eyes of myself, my mother, and my sister.
As children, we are often told stories, some of which may have practical value in the sense of providing young minds with lessons and morals for the future, whereas some stories create a notion of creativity and imagination in the child. In Karen Armstrong’s piece, “Homo Religiosus”, a discussion of something similar to the topic of storytelling could translate to the realm of religion. Armstrong defines religion as a, “matter of doing rather than thinking” (17) which she describes using an example in which adolescent boys in ancient religions, who were not given the time to “find themselves” but rather forced into hunting animals which ultimately prepares these boys to be able to die for their people, were made into men by the process of doing.
Updike, John. "A&P." Thinking and Writing About Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001. 981-86. Print.
An Australian poem which depicts the hash rural outback Australian climate. A bit of background information is Geoffrey Piers Henry Dutton was born on 2 August 1922, at his family’s property Anlaby, South Australia. In 1940, Dutton studied at the University of Adelaide, where he studied English, History and French. His studies were interrupted in 1941, when he joined the Royal Australian Air Force; he spent much of the war training, to eventually become a flight officer.
Religion in May 1966. It was reprinted with comments and a rejoined in The Religious Situation.
Anthony, D & Robbins, T. 2004. The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements. New York. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 25 February 2014, from the World Wide Web: http://www.skepsis.nl/onlinetexts.html
Composers show how confronting and meaningful discoveries can be through how their characters and settings of their works are depicted. I agree with this statement, because the discoveries made within a text by the audience are there to piece together the picture of which is the texts underlying motive. Examples of this can be seen in the texts ‘Rainbow’s End’ a play by Jane Harrison and the children’s book ‘The Rabbits’ by John Marsden and Shaun Tan. ‘Rainbow’s End’ follows a family of three Aboriginal Australian females; Gladys - single mother trying to support her daughter and help her succeed in life, Nan Dear – Gladys’s mother and Dolly – Gladys’s teenage daughter, showing the struggles that they as an Aboriginal family face in a Anglo-dominant, 1950’s Australian society. ‘The Rabbits’ is an allegory, or retelling, of the British colonisation of Australia, with the British being represented by rabbits and the Indigenous Australians being represented by numbats, an endangered Australian native animal. Both of these texts display themes of discrimination and assimilation towards aboriginals, giving us the chance to discover and understand their struggles.
Updike, John. "A&P." The Harper Anthology of Fiction. Ed. Sylvan Barnet. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.1026-1030.
Eastman, Roger. The Ways of Religion: An Introduction to the Major Traditions. Third Edition. Oxford University Press. N.Y. 1999
Pritchard, William H. "Remembering John Updike: A Critic and His Decades-Long Correspondence with one of America's Best ‘Freelance Writers...’’’ American Scholar 78.3 (2009): 115-117. Academic Search Complete. Web. 23 May 2010.
Both Willa Cather’s and John Updike’s early life experiences in discovering their identities reflect in their short stories, “Paul’s Case” and the “A&P”. Born into a strict family, Willa Cather could express the harsh expectations of teenagers through her protagonist, Paul. Willa
Molloy, Michael. Experiencing the World's Religions: Tradition, Challenge, and Change. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010. Print