James A. Schiff

Rewriting Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway: Homage, Sexual Identity, and the Single-Day Novel by Cunningham, Lippincott, and Lanchester

(2004). Rewriting Woolf@quot;s Mrs. Dalloway: Homage, Sexual Identity, and the Single-Day Novel by Cunningham, Lippincott, and Lanchester. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 45, No. 4, pp. 363-382.

Contemporary Retellings: A Thousand Acres as the Latest Lear

Abstract In this century, and particularly since Joyces Ulysses, numerous novels and poems have attempted to retell earlier stories, myths, and fairy tales. Between 1920 and 1980, writers such as Yeats, Lawrence, Faulkner, Mann, Hermann Hesse, Max Frisch, Anthony Burgess, John Barth, Bernard Malamud, Jean Rhys, John Gardner, Donald Barthelme, Anne Sexton, John Updike, and Angela Carter have employed the “mythical method,” a term for literature that explicitly attempts to retell earlier stories that have achieved mythic significance.

Reading and Writing on Screen: Cinematic Adaptations of McEwan's Atonement and Cunningham's The Hours

This essay considers cinematic adaptations of two recent, successful novels, Ian McEwans Atonement (2001) and Michael Cunninghams The Hours (1998). Given that both novels are highly intertextual, filled with literary allusions and homage, and both self-consciously depict and explore activities of reading and writing, one might imagine it problematic to adapt such works to film. Yet each was adapted quickly and successfully. This essay explores how these “literary novels” were adapted to the screen: how the screenwriters and directors handled the self-conscious exploration of reading and writing, the metanarrative, and density of literary allusions and intertextuality.

Updike's Scarlet Letter Trilogy: Recasting an American Myth

Though many readers are aware of how John Updike has chronicled America of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in his Rabbit tetralogy, few have paid close attention to his other multivolume work concerning America (and a canonical American text), namely the Scarlet Letter trilogy. In 1975 Updike published A Month of Sundays, a novel in diary form in which a spiritually tormented and adulterous minister from Massachusetts is ordered to an Arizona motel for ministers-goneastray; there he is urged to wrestle with his perverse soul and rub out his “stain.” Updike later referred to that novel as “Dimmesdale’s version” of The Scarlet Letter. In 1986 Updike published Roger’s Version, an unreliable first-person narrative in which a Harvard professor, a crusty old doctor of divinity named Roger, manipulates and feeds upon the life of a youthful, pious computer science graduate student named Dale. Most recently, in 1988, Updike published the epistolary S., in which an angry North Shore housewife, with a strong predilection for Vitamin A, rebels against her Puritan heritage and patriarchal society by traveling to a desert ashram in Arizona. In these three novels, each told from the perspective of one of Hawthorne’s three protagonists, Updike has expanded, updated, satirized, and rewritten Hawthorne’s text. That such a bold and intriguing project should go largely unrecognized by the critical community is surprising. Though these novels, with the notable exception of Roger’s Version, are lighter fare and less substantial than the best of Updike (the Rabbit books, The Centaur, The Coup), the project is significant. Any reconsideration of a canonical text by a major literary figure should warrant attention, particularly in light of the contemporary interest in intertextuality. In addition, the project is significant in that it reveals a more experimental and postmodern Updike, one who shares Nabokov’s sense of word play and games.

John Updike and David Foster Wallace: Of Binaries, Sports Writing, and Transcendence

ABSTRACT A comparative analysis of John Updike and David Foster Wallace which directs attention to their efforts in sports writing and memoir. The essay problematizes the binary of Updike and Wallace as polar opposites: the former uncool, traditional, and narcissistic; the latter hip, postmodern, and empathic. After an analysis of Wallace’s denigrating review of Updike’s Toward the End of Time, the essay reveals substantive similarities and differences through a consideration of two sets of paired essays: Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” and Wallace’s “Federer Both Flesh and Not”; Updike’s “A Soft Spring Night in Shillington” and Wallace’s “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley.” Updike is seen as an observer and storyteller, a writer drawn to celebration of the visual world. In contrast, Wallace is more critic and philosopher than observer, continually struggling to figure things out. With attention to ambition and transcendence, both in sports and writing, the essay posits the two authors less as competitors or antagonists, and more as fellow aspirants to the American sublime.