Through the Painterly Seeing: The Mediated Immediacy in John Updike’s Rabbit, Run

• Main Authors: Chen, Yu-Tsun, 陳禹村
• Other Authors: Aaron Deveson
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/hcp5d6

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 106 === The thesis aims to suggest that in Rabbit, Run (1960), the most famous novel of John Updike (1932-2009), the author creates ekphrasis of paintings and the windows for the purpose of rendering the immediate experience felt in the 1950s America. Chapter One will take Updike’s three works of art criticism—Just Looking (1989), Still Looking (2005) and Always Looking (2012)— as its main texts. Through his art criticisms, I shall introduce Updike’s modernist influence, aesthetics and the general way he talks about art. Chapter Two compares the ekphrastic similarities between Rabbit, Run and Updike’s art criticisms on Jan Vermeer, Ameodeo Modigliani, Edward Hopper and Jackson Pollock. By doing so, I hope to provide evidence that Updike does use different painting modes in the novel, and the verbal paintings are there for a reason. I shall argue that the verbal paintings are used as objective correlatives of what Updike calls “middleness.” To cope with that middleness, the painterly seeing offers the characters a strategy of being, which glorifies and transcends anonymity, tension and alienation that are peculiar to modern American society. Chapter Three focuses on the deepening of everyday seeing. The chapter shows that Updike is not merely reliant on the allusive sort of seeing discussed in Chapter Two. Rather, seeing through the window, where the characters’ eyes often focused, is as valuable. In the novel, the complex materiality of the window reflects and inspires the characters’ consciousness. The window thus gives readers a concrete form to revisit the abstract Cold War felt by the suburban Americans in 1950s.