John Updike, 1932 - 2009

• Author of many novels, collections of short stories, books of poems and books of essays

• Individual narrative style that often draws upon the realistic mode of depiction (especially in the Rabbits), but can be rhythmical, uses metaphors, and is unique in its social criticism… In later fiction he employs, however, different postmodern techniques.

• Updike´s novels tend to be directly socially involved in current issues – a „novelist of manners“ (the label of lit. historian Robert F. Kiernan), together with Joyce Carol Oates, Jerome David Salinger, John Cheever: they explore manners of 20c. middle-class America with a focus on WASPs

• The Rabbit Saga attempted to picture the social atmosphere of whole decades starting with the 1950s in Rabbit, Run (1960; Králíku, utíkej, 1980)

John Updike, some works

• Rabbit Redux, 1971; Králík se vrací 2007

• Rabbit is Rich, 1981 (Pulitzer Prize); Králík je bohatý, 1990

• Rabbit at Rest, 1991 (Pulitzer Prize)

• Short story „Rabbit Remembered“ (in Licks of Love, 2000)

• Couples, 1968: interested in what can happen to bored, affluent marital life in the time of the sexual revolution; uses thematic hyperbole that has a satirical effect

• Bech: a Book, 1970: short stories that feature a writer as the main protagonist; targets many issues; and also parodies the introspective mode of American Jewish fiction that became a vogue by that time. (povídka „Bech in Czech“, 1987; Bech co Čech (č. in Světová literatura 6/90).

John Updike´s moral interest in the Puritan tradition which he projects onto the present

shows in: • A Month of Sundays, 1975

• The Witches of Eastwick, 1984 (followed by The Widows of Eastwick, 2008)

• Roger´s Version, 1986

Sylvia Plath 1932 -1963

• Poet who is recognized as a remarkable representative of confessional poetry – lyrical creativity that channels the innermost, torturing and irresolvable conflicts of the psyche, in a dramatic way, into poetic forms. Confessional poetry emerged at the end of the 1950s, being inspired by American poet Robert Lowell.

• The Colossus and Other Poems, 1960• Ariel, 1965. Česky 1984 (přel. Jan Zábrana)

– They are poems, as Robert Lowell says in his preface to Ariel, that "play Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder."[

• Collected Poems, 1981 (Pulitzer Prize)

Sylvia Plath has become a seminal figure of modern English writing by women…

• author of one novel, The Bell Jar, publ. one month before her death, in 1963, in Britain, posthumously in the USA; č. 1996 (trsl. By Tomáš Hrách)– Uses autobiographic experience

– In the first person narrative, it becomes, after Jerome D. Salinger´s Catcher in the Rye (who, among other writers could draw inspiration from Mark Twain), an important literary text representing an adolescent´s subjective viewpoint on the American society of the 1950s.

– Unlike Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, Esther Greenwood goes through a serious conflict with the gender norms of the society…

Sylvia Plath continued

• The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982); The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kukil (2000): express the dilemma of woman´s roles with which Plath permanently struggled, and which made Plath the icon of the feminist movement that started in the 1960s.

• Plath was the wife of British poet Ted Hughes• Současná česká hra Radky Denemarkové, Spací vady,

kterou uvádělo Divadlo na zábradlí, obsadila S. Plathovou a V. Woolfovou jako dvě ze tří hlavních hrdinek, které ztělesňují ženský boj s rodem; vedou přitom kupodivu zábavný dialog.

Vladimir Nabokov 1899-1977

• Of Russian noble origin; after the Bolshevik revolution, in 1919, the family left Russia and sought exile in western Europe:

• They lived in England (Nabokov studied in Cambridge, see the novel Glory), in Berlin (where his father was assassinated by Russian monarchists). Adult Nabokov left Germany for France; in 1940 he and his family emigrated to the USA

Nabokov was a trilingual speaker since his childhood; a cosmopolitan personality

• He became a successful academic, teacher of Russian literature and language at Wellesley College; at Cornell University

• He seriously pursued his interest in lepidoptery • He was able to write in Russian, English and French; he translated his

works from Russian into English himself…• Specific qualities of his literary English; his discernable playful and

experimenting use of this language…• His first novel written in English was The Real Life of Sebastian Knight,

1941• Lolita, published in 1955, became his most famous work. He himself

translated it into Russian. (Publ. In Czech in 1991,trsl. Pavel Dominik, reedited trsl 2003.)

• The extraordinary success of Lolita made it possible for the Nabokovs to return to Europe: Montreaux, Switzerland…

Lolita

• A postmodern novel… the writing disturbs an illusion of veracity; plays with genres…

• Humbert Humbert´s unique view of America of the 1950s …

• Relativity; ambiguity…