A List
9/4/06

SLU PROF TO SPEAK ON HIS NEW BOOK ABOUT AUTHOR UPDIKE

CANTON - St. Lawrence University Professor of English Peter Bailey will speak about his new book, Rabbit (Un)Redeemed: The Drama of Belief in John Updike's Fiction, on Friday, September 15, at 4 p.m. in the Josephine Young Room of Owen D. Young Library. The event, open to the public free of charge, is the first in this year's series of author celebrations held by the University's Friends of Owen D. Young and Launders Libraries.

Bailey's book, published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, offers a selective reading of Updike's work, dramatizing the author's career-spanning dialogue with his complexly fragile religious beliefs. Bailey interprets the Rabbit (those including the character of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom) saga as fictionalized spiritual autobiography. Between his aspirations to create fiction emulating patterns of transcendent meaning and his apprehension that a form of realism is all that he can achieve in prose, Updike has created, and Bailey has documented, one of the preeminent dramas of contemporary American culture and fiction: a literary engagement of the post-Christian with the postmodern.

Bailey attended Kenyon College and the New School College, New School of Social Research, from which he received his bachelor's degree. After earning a master's degree at the Writing Seminars, The Johns Hopkins University, Bailey earned the Ph.D. in English from the University of Southern California. He joined the St. Lawrence faculty in 1980, teaching American literature and fiction writing, and directs the Jeffrey Campbell Graduate Fellowship program. Bailey is the author of the books Reading Stanley Elkin (1986) and The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (2000).

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