Not P but DFW: PC backlash

[Mark Kohut]

Essence is as communicated

On Tue, Jul 8, 2025 at 9:35 AM Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
>>>
>>