Rabbit Is (Un)Learning: Curriculum, Testimony, and (Re)Turning in Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy

• In Event: Testimonies as Method: Transformative Curricular Practices From Communities to the Self

Abstract

This paper analyzes Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy as a curriculum study to reconsider the role of language and responsibility in the crafting of autobiography. A method of intertextuality will be employed, particularly using the corpus of Derrida’s texts in conversation with Mayra Rivera’s Poetics of the Flesh. Updike’s protagonist receives, by the author’s own admission, an “education” within the series. I seek to interrogate what that means for “Rabbit,” and his inability to testify, or bear witness, about his measured escape from his responsibilities. Finally, the paper seeks to consider how we might reimagine education by what I call a (re)turning as unlearning.

Author

• Christopher Michael Cruz, Florida International University