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Urban Poetics in John Updike’s Sonnet “New York City”
JIN Tao
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2022.11.001
College of International Studies, Southwest University, Chongqing, China; School of Foreign Languages, Jiangsu University of Technology, Changzhou, China
Based on Robert E. Park’s theoretical frame of social urban study, the “psychophysical mechanism”, urban poetics mainly researches the mutual relations between the physical and the moral organizations of a city in urban poems, novels and dramas. This article considers John Updike as an urban poet since his poem collection Americana (2001) is a collection of urban poems. One of the representative poems, the sonnet “New York City”, depicts a despairing “separate nation” by presenting three typical physical cityscapes: television, beggars and skyscrapers. Each physical cityscape reveals its cultural value and social tradition of the city, and the psychological problems of the city dwellers. Tracing Updike’s personal urban experience and the poem’s intertextual space, this article explores his criticism on American big city: the alienated human relations, the anxiety of city life and the smallness of solipsism. His intention to parody John Milton’s Pandemonium in Paradise Lost, and to pay homage to Walt Whitman, reveals that this sonnet embodies rich connotations of urban poetics.
urban poetics, Updike, “New York City”, Milton, Whitman
Journal of Literature and Art Studies, November 2022, Vol. 12, No. 11, 1083-1094
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