FROM “A&P” TO “ARABY”: AN UNBUSY COMPARATIST’S GUIDED PROGRESS
FROM “A&P” TO “ARABY”: AN UNBUSY COMPARATIST’S GUIDED PROGRESS

Summary/Abstract: The “unbusy comparatist” (Joyce repeatedly boasted that he wrote books to keep the professors busy) starts from John Updike’s “A&P” as a self-sustained story, originating in a simple “epiphanic” event recollected by the author himself (his occasional driving past a local A&P somewhere in Massachusetts), moves on to seeing some of its autobiographical and scholarly sources, then gets on to view it in wider and wider cultural-literary contexts until James Joyce’s “Araby” is identified (Wells, Gray, Connor and other “guides”) as its most likely inspiration; “Araby” once reached (and almost completely replacing “A&P”), our comparatist cannot help being entangled in its own sources, parallelisms, similarities, allusions, and influences, some of which may also reach back (or forward) to Updike’s story. The paper then analyzes the narrator-s, the medieval and religious background, Orientalism, the author’s use of irony,, and this very author’s ironic quest.

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