Abstract This article probes the famous metaphor from Little Dorrit when Amy Dorrit is called the ‘vanishing point’ in Arthur’s ‘poor story’. Considering in conjunction with theories of perspectival drawing, belief, and ‘representative thinking’, it suggests the metaphor of the vanishing point for Charles Dickens yields a broader ethical argument regarding how one might engage with the beliefs of others. Rather than simply endorsing or rejecting others’ beliefs based on their grounding in empirical reality, Dickens suggests there is distinct moral value in maintaining and cultivating other’s beliefs—even the most ungrounded beliefs—rather than reflexively exploding them.
{"title":"<i>LITTLE DORRIT</i> AND THE STRUCTURE OF BELIEF","authors":"Winter Jade Werner","doi":"10.1093/litthe/frad026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frad026","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article probes the famous metaphor from Little Dorrit when Amy Dorrit is called the ‘vanishing point’ in Arthur’s ‘poor story’. Considering in conjunction with theories of perspectival drawing, belief, and ‘representative thinking’, it suggests the metaphor of the vanishing point for Charles Dickens yields a broader ethical argument regarding how one might engage with the beliefs of others. Rather than simply endorsing or rejecting others’ beliefs based on their grounding in empirical reality, Dickens suggests there is distinct moral value in maintaining and cultivating other’s beliefs—even the most ungrounded beliefs—rather than reflexively exploding them.","PeriodicalId":43172,"journal":{"name":"Literature and Theology","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135734155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas. By Robert Zaretsky","authors":"Jonathan W Chappell","doi":"10.1093/litthe/frad001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frad001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43172,"journal":{"name":"Literature and Theology","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77512406","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lyric Theology: Art and The Doctrine of Creation. By Thomas Gardner","authors":"Elizabeth S Dodd","doi":"10.1093/litthe/frad005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frad005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43172,"journal":{"name":"Literature and Theology","volume":"43 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79074868","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Recent literary and theological accounts of forgiveness have appealed to the poetic as offering an ‘ambiguous’ space appropriate to the complex process of forgiving. In this article I will texture these accounts with a close reading of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Marina’, which is well-placed as an example of this style of poetics. Beyond ambiguity, however, ‘Marina’ communicates an account of forgiveness that can be read generatively alongside Sara Ahmed’s category of ‘queer use’. The poetics of ‘Marina’ will thereby provide a conceptual pattern for a movement towards healing, beyond painful histories, without erasing the past. This, in turn, will highlight the importance of Ahmed’s ‘queer use’ for contemporary theological accounts of forgiveness.
{"title":"Intersections of Forgiveness and ‘Queer Use’ In T.S. Eliot’s ‘Marina’","authors":"Tanya Kundu","doi":"10.1093/litthe/frad004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frad004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Recent literary and theological accounts of forgiveness have appealed to the poetic as offering an ‘ambiguous’ space appropriate to the complex process of forgiving. In this article I will texture these accounts with a close reading of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Marina’, which is well-placed as an example of this style of poetics. Beyond ambiguity, however, ‘Marina’ communicates an account of forgiveness that can be read generatively alongside Sara Ahmed’s category of ‘queer use’. The poetics of ‘Marina’ will thereby provide a conceptual pattern for a movement towards healing, beyond painful histories, without erasing the past. This, in turn, will highlight the importance of Ahmed’s ‘queer use’ for contemporary theological accounts of forgiveness.","PeriodicalId":43172,"journal":{"name":"Literature and Theology","volume":"107 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87743261","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The idea that human language is an inherently inadequate instrument for grasping reality is widespread in modernist literature. While the ‘radical nominalism’ of this position has been recognised, this article argues that a genealogical understanding of its theological roots in medieval nominalism can highlight how modernist writers like Samuel Beckett and Wallace Stevens still wrestle with a voluntarist God of absolute and arbitrary power. By contrast, for a writer like David Jones, the historical choice of nominalism amounts to a theological mistake, and the modern artist needs to rediscover a God who consecrates and redeems the human capacity for sign-making.
{"title":"Modernism, Nominalism, and the Hidden God in Samuel Beckett, Wallace Stevens, and David Jones","authors":"Erik Tonning","doi":"10.1093/litthe/frac034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frac034","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The idea that human language is an inherently inadequate instrument for grasping reality is widespread in modernist literature. While the ‘radical nominalism’ of this position has been recognised, this article argues that a genealogical understanding of its theological roots in medieval nominalism can highlight how modernist writers like Samuel Beckett and Wallace Stevens still wrestle with a voluntarist God of absolute and arbitrary power. By contrast, for a writer like David Jones, the historical choice of nominalism amounts to a theological mistake, and the modern artist needs to rediscover a God who consecrates and redeems the human capacity for sign-making.","PeriodicalId":43172,"journal":{"name":"Literature and Theology","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135131139","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This article offers a reading of George MacDonald as a ‘mystic’. According to MacDonald himself, a ‘mystic’ is one who ‘sees one thing everywhere and all things the same’. I seek to show how MacDonald’s understanding of the mutual interplay of unity and difference not only establishes MacDonald’s mystical credentials, but provides weighty material for the creative development of metaphysical and theological concepts today.
{"title":"Old Forgotten Flowers: George Macdonald as Mystic","authors":"Jerome Klotz","doi":"10.1093/litthe/frad003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frad003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article offers a reading of George MacDonald as a ‘mystic’. According to MacDonald himself, a ‘mystic’ is one who ‘sees one thing everywhere and all things the same’. I seek to show how MacDonald’s understanding of the mutual interplay of unity and difference not only establishes MacDonald’s mystical credentials, but provides weighty material for the creative development of metaphysical and theological concepts today.","PeriodicalId":43172,"journal":{"name":"Literature and Theology","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135131126","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fantastic Creatures of the Mountains and Seas: A Chinese Classic. By Jiankun Sun and Siyu Chen","authors":"Wei Zhao","doi":"10.1093/litthe/frad002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frad002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43172,"journal":{"name":"Literature and Theology","volume":"23 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88223380","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
How can the teacher open what Charles Taylor describes as the ‘immanent frame’ of a secular self-sufficient view of reality? This article describes two modules studying non-realist literary modes—Gothic and fantasy writing—which seek to do this. God and the Gothic reverses the psychological turn in 19th-century Gothic to examine the way Tzvetan Todorov’s idea of the fantastic hesitation can be used to enable an opening to the transcendent and offers a new way of narrating Victorian Gothic through Gaskell, Oliphant, and Machen. Religion and Fantasy invokes the defamiliarising technique of Victor Shklovsky and the magic idealism of Novalis to connect German and British imaginative writing from Coleridge, through John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, and Christina Rossetti.
{"title":"Making Strange: Teaching 19th-Century Gothic and Fantastic Literature","authors":"Alison Milbank","doi":"10.1093/litthe/frac031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frac031","url":null,"abstract":"How can the teacher open what Charles Taylor describes as the ‘immanent frame’ of a secular self-sufficient view of reality? This article describes two modules studying non-realist literary modes—Gothic and fantasy writing—which seek to do this. God and the Gothic reverses the psychological turn in 19th-century Gothic to examine the way Tzvetan Todorov’s idea of the fantastic hesitation can be used to enable an opening to the transcendent and offers a new way of narrating Victorian Gothic through Gaskell, Oliphant, and Machen. Religion and Fantasy invokes the defamiliarising technique of Victor Shklovsky and the magic idealism of Novalis to connect German and British imaginative writing from Coleridge, through John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, and Christina Rossetti.","PeriodicalId":43172,"journal":{"name":"Literature and Theology","volume":"2015 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138518461","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Victorian literature course, ‘Victorians Reading Religion’, relocates the religious friction of the 19th century, focusing less on scientific threats, crises of faith, and schisms within Victorian churches, and more on how the shifting religious landscape of 19th-century British culture prompted Victorian thinkers to renegotiate their approaches to reading. Using Olive Schriener’s Story of an African Farm (1883) as a prime example, attending to these overlapping iterations of religious experience offers us three correlated opportunities: firstly, it helps students loosen the identity categories they might otherwise consistently apply too tidily. Secondly, it reintroduces literature as a space in which they can evaluate morality. Finally, centring religion in literary studies prompts students to recognise the ways in which the work we do in a literature classroom is itself religious. Together, these pedagogical opportunities produce occasions for metacognition that help students articulate the value of humanistic study in the increasingly instrumentalised landscape of higher education.
{"title":"Religion, Reading, and Metacognition in the Victorian Literature Classroom","authors":"Aubrey Plourde","doi":"10.1093/litthe/frac030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frac030","url":null,"abstract":"The Victorian literature course, ‘Victorians Reading Religion’, relocates the religious friction of the 19th century, focusing less on scientific threats, crises of faith, and schisms within Victorian churches, and more on how the shifting religious landscape of 19th-century British culture prompted Victorian thinkers to renegotiate their approaches to reading. Using Olive Schriener’s Story of an African Farm (1883) as a prime example, attending to these overlapping iterations of religious experience offers us three correlated opportunities: firstly, it helps students loosen the identity categories they might otherwise consistently apply too tidily. Secondly, it reintroduces literature as a space in which they can evaluate morality. Finally, centring religion in literary studies prompts students to recognise the ways in which the work we do in a literature classroom is itself religious. Together, these pedagogical opportunities produce occasions for metacognition that help students articulate the value of humanistic study in the increasingly instrumentalised landscape of higher education.","PeriodicalId":43172,"journal":{"name":"Literature and Theology","volume":"2009 14","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138518469","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The widescale revision of the secularisation thesis continues apace across the humanities and more specifically in 19th-century studies—a field that until recently often assumed the ‘subtraction’ story of secularisation in which, as Charles Taylor explains, modernity leads to the inevitable demise of religion. But how does this revised outlook inform the teaching of 19th-century literature? In other words, if we now question the notion that the 19th century sees the inexorable decline of faith, how does that questioning change the way we teach Romantic and/or Victorian literature? The following special forum addresses such questions.
{"title":"Teaching 19th-Century Literature Beyond the Secularisation Thesis: Introduction to the Special Forum","authors":"Joseph McQueen","doi":"10.1093/litthe/frac025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frac025","url":null,"abstract":"The widescale revision of the secularisation thesis continues apace across the humanities and more specifically in 19th-century studies—a field that until recently often assumed the ‘subtraction’ story of secularisation in which, as Charles Taylor explains, modernity leads to the inevitable demise of religion. But how does this revised outlook inform the teaching of 19th-century literature? In other words, if we now question the notion that the 19th century sees the inexorable decline of faith, how does that questioning change the way we teach Romantic and/or Victorian literature? The following special forum addresses such questions.","PeriodicalId":43172,"journal":{"name":"Literature and Theology","volume":"2022 26","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138518470","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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