Affection for the Affected World: John Updike on Emotion, Sense, and Style

Abstract

The style of John Updike's prose offers a complex and, at times, surprising philosophy of the postmodern subject. In his memoir, Self-Consciousness, Updike compares his work to the French novelist Michel Tournier's. It is an overlooked passage, but one that should shape our construal of Updike's characteristic concern with subjectivity in light of what some philosophers heralded as the “death of the subject.” It is not the dissolution of subjectivity, however, but John Dewey's account of the aesthetic subject that best unfolds the formal nuances Updike draws between the emotions, the senses, and the philosophical implications of his literary style. Not incoherence, but depth of affection defines the emotional subject he creates and the deliberately stylized realism of his prose.