商品簡介
This book looks past the frequently discussed autobiographical nature of John Updike's fiction to consider the role in Updike's work of the most powerful and peculiar human faculty: the imagination. Michial Farmer argues that, while the imagination is for Updike a means of human survival and a necessary component of human flourishing, it also has a destructive, darker side, in which it shades into something like philosophical idealism. Here the mind constructs the world around it and then, unhelpfully, imposes this created world between itself and the "real world." In other words, Updike is not himself an idealist but sees idealism as a persistent temptation for the artistic imagination. The philosophical background for the book's argument consists not only of the major proponents of idealism (including Berkeley, Kant, and Royce) but also of theorists of imagination from the broad existentialist tradition with which Updike identified: Sartre, Mary Warnock, Edward S. Casey, Colin Wilson, and others. The book demonstrates the degree to which Updike was an original and powerful thinker and not the callow sensationalist that he is sometimes accused of being. Michial Farmer is Assistant Professor of English at Crown College, Saint Bonifacius, Minnesota.
