Do Ellen Gilchrist and Jill McCorkle Have Anything to Say

One of the best courses I ever took in graduate school was a seminar on John Updike who, at the time, had pubUshed only a half-dozen or so books. He was most criticaUy revered for his creation of Rabbit Angstrom in the short story "Ace in the Hole" and the novel Rabbit, Run-, he was most criticaUy rev?ed for his potbo?er, Couples. Nobody yet knew how seriously to take John Updike's fiction. One of the typical charges made in print about him was "does John Updike have anything to say?" I remember being enthraUed by the Updike seminar because our pro fessor made us students feel Uke explorers. John Updike was new, unset tled, certainly controversial and possibly dangerous territory. AU contem porary American Uterature in those days (has this changed?) was treated by the academy as the brainch?dren of lesser gods. Our teacher seemed to be as much in the dark about Updike as we were. This was a new experi ence for me: to observe that professional scholars flailed about uncer tainly in their efforts to comprehend and evaluate the latest Uterary up start. Our classroom had the sizzle of experiment rather than the cool mechanics of autopsy. The term had not been invented yet?Uterary scholarship stiU strained at the stranglehold of New Criticism?but our teacher, Professor Ellis, introduced us to the value of intertextual reading.