Not P but DFW: PC backlash

[Mike Jing]

Interesting. I, for one, would like to see your counter arguments.

Thanks for the reply, Mark.


On Tue, Jul 8, 2025 at 6:27 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> I definitely think so........the man-woman thing in Updike, so traditional
> basically.....I mean The Witches of
> Eastwick, what women want to even read that?....his politics were not
> Left--progressive.....
>
> I heard a younger generation woman once just say "Updike was just a
> prick"...personally...(although she never knew him
> other than through his writing or interviews.
>
> I have an unfinished essay 'refuting"-- LOL---I'm so full of myself
> sometimes---this particular essay
> The "self-absorption of the characters" which many lit crits think mean
> well-created characters who
> are self-absorbed because Americans of his/our time were...and are?....
>
> On Tue, Jul 8, 2025 at 6:10 AM Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> The following excerpt is from David Foster Wallace's review of John
>> Updike’s *Toward the End of Time*:
>>
>> Most of the literary readers I know personally are under forty, and a fair
>> number are female, and none of them are big admirers of the postwar GMNs.
>> But it’s John Updike in particular that a lot of them seem to hate. And
>> not
>> merely his books, for some reason—mention the poor man himself and you
>> have
>> to jump back:
>> . . . . . .
>> There are, of course, some obvious explanations for part of this
>> dislike—jealousy, iconoclasm, PC backlash, and the fact that many of our
>> parents revere Updike and it’s easy to revile what your parents revere.
>> But
>> I think the deep reason so many of my generation dislike Updike and the
>> other GMNs has to do with these writers’ radical self-absorption, and with
>> their uncritical celebration of this self-absorption both in themselves
>> and
>> in their characters.
>>
>> What does "PC backlash" mean here? Does it mean that Updike was considered
>> un-PC, thus suffering backlash from PC-minded readers?
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>