Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10189333
T. DeYoung
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Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10088744
E. Mason
The radicalism of Christianity is often underplayed in literary studies by scholars who perceive its theology as politically suspect and inflexible. Yet an unwillingness to engage with Christian theology and experience produces critical misreadings of literary texts that reveal Christianity’s doctrines and ideas as anything but myopic. This essay explores the doctrine of kenosis as integral to Christianity’s compassionate vision in the work of two writers associated with the nineteenth-century Catholic revival: Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Kenosis describes Christ’s becoming human as a temporary letting go of his divinity; for Rossetti and Hopkins, this models a way of being and thinking in which the subject is untied from an ego desirous of control and power. Both writers consequently embraced the interdependence of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the Trinity as a way of conceptualizing faith through shared humility and weakness. This approach to the self, the world, and God is an important one to identify in Christian texts, but it also exemplifies a Christian way of thinking more broadly attuned to the depiction of vulnerability and introspection in literature and culture.
{"title":"Reading Christian Experience","authors":"E. Mason","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10088744","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10088744","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The radicalism of Christianity is often underplayed in literary studies by scholars who perceive its theology as politically suspect and inflexible. Yet an unwillingness to engage with Christian theology and experience produces critical misreadings of literary texts that reveal Christianity’s doctrines and ideas as anything but myopic. This essay explores the doctrine of kenosis as integral to Christianity’s compassionate vision in the work of two writers associated with the nineteenth-century Catholic revival: Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Kenosis describes Christ’s becoming human as a temporary letting go of his divinity; for Rossetti and Hopkins, this models a way of being and thinking in which the subject is untied from an ego desirous of control and power. Both writers consequently embraced the interdependence of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the Trinity as a way of conceptualizing faith through shared humility and weakness. This approach to the self, the world, and God is an important one to identify in Christian texts, but it also exemplifies a Christian way of thinking more broadly attuned to the depiction of vulnerability and introspection in literature and culture.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74380830","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10088666
Jan-Melissa Schramm
This essay traces the intense interrelatedness of the three discourses that we now consider distinct but that ask similar questions about the existential value of life and the relationship between spiritual and temporal matters. Law, literature, and theology address crucial and complementary issues of epistemology—that is, questions of evidence-based knowledge and how we ground our ethical deliberations on these evidential foundations.
{"title":"The Role of Religious Thought in Interdisciplinary “Law and Literature” Studies","authors":"Jan-Melissa Schramm","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10088666","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10088666","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay traces the intense interrelatedness of the three discourses that we now consider distinct but that ask similar questions about the existential value of life and the relationship between spiritual and temporal matters. Law, literature, and theology address crucial and complementary issues of epistemology—that is, questions of evidence-based knowledge and how we ground our ethical deliberations on these evidential foundations.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75207606","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10088627
M. Knight, Charles Laporte
{"title":"Talking about Religion in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Studies","authors":"M. Knight, Charles Laporte","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10088627","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10088627","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89963063","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10088679
Colin Jager
This essay summarizes some of the arguments about secularism and secularization that have productively unsettled the study of religion in the past two decades. It then turns to the question of what literary studies can offer to the study of religion. Literary scholarship takes an interest in persons, situations, and worlds imagined at a level of detail and complexity well beyond the fictional placeholders other disciplines employ in their thought experiments. This raises ethical and ontological questions about the “reality” of our objects of study. Dominant Western epistemological traditions, which get their leverage from a distinction between illusion and reality, struggle with such in-between spaces. However, this is the space in which literary studies lives, and acknowledging that may help us decide why literature is a compelling and disturbing maker of religious sense.
{"title":"Phantom Belief and Belief in Phantoms: The Strange Objects of Literary Study","authors":"Colin Jager","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10088679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10088679","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay summarizes some of the arguments about secularism and secularization that have productively unsettled the study of religion in the past two decades. It then turns to the question of what literary studies can offer to the study of religion. Literary scholarship takes an interest in persons, situations, and worlds imagined at a level of detail and complexity well beyond the fictional placeholders other disciplines employ in their thought experiments. This raises ethical and ontological questions about the “reality” of our objects of study. Dominant Western epistemological traditions, which get their leverage from a distinction between illusion and reality, struggle with such in-between spaces. However, this is the space in which literary studies lives, and acknowledging that may help us decide why literature is a compelling and disturbing maker of religious sense.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81719098","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10088705
A. Hernandez
This essay explores tensions between the practice of critique and recent calls for nonreductive engagement with global spiritualities, arguing for an approach to these experiences that is informed by the study of “lived religion.” Beginning with a discussion of contemporary devotional readings centered on Jane Austen’s oeuvre, it asks how literary criticism might productively read the long-standing entanglement of Austen studies with practices typically dismissed as problematically cultic, religious, or spiritually syncretic. In response to this, the essay places lived religion’s methodological approaches and many of its core insights in dialogue with contemporary discussions of description and postcritique in the literary humanities, drawing out shared implications, potential strengths, and limitations in the reading of religion. The essay thereby argues for increased attention not only to how text is used in idiosyncratic spiritual practices but to our own assumptions about what religion is and does for practitioners and critics alike.
{"title":"In the Church of Saint Jane: Literature, Lived Religion, and the Descriptive Turn","authors":"A. Hernandez","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10088705","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10088705","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay explores tensions between the practice of critique and recent calls for nonreductive engagement with global spiritualities, arguing for an approach to these experiences that is informed by the study of “lived religion.” Beginning with a discussion of contemporary devotional readings centered on Jane Austen’s oeuvre, it asks how literary criticism might productively read the long-standing entanglement of Austen studies with practices typically dismissed as problematically cultic, religious, or spiritually syncretic. In response to this, the essay places lived religion’s methodological approaches and many of its core insights in dialogue with contemporary discussions of description and postcritique in the literary humanities, drawing out shared implications, potential strengths, and limitations in the reading of religion. The essay thereby argues for increased attention not only to how text is used in idiosyncratic spiritual practices but to our own assumptions about what religion is and does for practitioners and critics alike.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77025521","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10088692
Peter Coviello
This essay takes up two conceptual formations of great consequence to Herman Melville: “religion” and “literature.” Part of what binds them so tightly for Melville is a set of transformative upheavals in liberal culture that we have lately come to know by a different name: “secularism.” Melville helps us think secularism not as the extirpation of religion in modernity but as an ensemble of broadly disciplinary interventions, whose aim was both to exalt Protestant Christianity as the authorizing sign for planetary white dominion and to demote theology itself into a practice of gentle suasion, private consciousness-raising, influence. Moby-Dick is a novel shouting not into the void of a world abandoned by God—or not only—but into the empty space where the theocratic authority of the pulpit once was, where words fired by the titanic power of Godliness itself narrated, shaped, made history. In his fury and his despair, Melville maps out in cartographic detail the solidification of what would become “literature” as such as a by-product of secular discipline.
{"title":"Did God Write Moby-Dick?","authors":"Peter Coviello","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10088692","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10088692","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay takes up two conceptual formations of great consequence to Herman Melville: “religion” and “literature.” Part of what binds them so tightly for Melville is a set of transformative upheavals in liberal culture that we have lately come to know by a different name: “secularism.” Melville helps us think secularism not as the extirpation of religion in modernity but as an ensemble of broadly disciplinary interventions, whose aim was both to exalt Protestant Christianity as the authorizing sign for planetary white dominion and to demote theology itself into a practice of gentle suasion, private consciousness-raising, influence. Moby-Dick is a novel shouting not into the void of a world abandoned by God—or not only—but into the empty space where the theocratic authority of the pulpit once was, where words fired by the titanic power of Godliness itself narrated, shaped, made history. In his fury and his despair, Melville maps out in cartographic detail the solidification of what would become “literature” as such as a by-product of secular discipline.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75924063","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10088757
D. Lynch
{"title":"Keeping Faith with Literature","authors":"D. Lynch","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10088757","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10088757","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80702863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10088640
Lori Branch
This article explains the puzzling but persistent marginalization of religion and secularism studies—despite long-standing critiques of secularism and the secularization thesis—by examining a vignette from a doctoral exam in English. The article argues that in professional and pedagogical settings, secularism is ritualistically reinstantiated in informal exchanges such that scholarly disregard for religion becomes, in Peter Coviello’s words, “a part of our untheorized and offhand real.” Such informally but intensely pedagogical moments bear inextricably scholarly implications and suggest that, if we wish to speak differently about religion, we should replace this implicit pedagogy of dismissing religion and reinstantiating secularism with an explicit pedagogy engaging the secular/religious binary. As a discipline, we need to take up religion in our literature classrooms in ways that dovetail with our operative methodologies, even as they catalyze and alter them, and that neither reboot the secularization thesis nor reify the secular/religious binary and, more important, that are helpful to our students, our society, and ourselves. The article then addresses a concrete example of how scholars from a range of methodologies can develop and implement such postsecular pedagogies.
{"title":"How to Talk about Religion and Literature: A Modest Proposal","authors":"Lori Branch","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10088640","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10088640","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article explains the puzzling but persistent marginalization of religion and secularism studies—despite long-standing critiques of secularism and the secularization thesis—by examining a vignette from a doctoral exam in English. The article argues that in professional and pedagogical settings, secularism is ritualistically reinstantiated in informal exchanges such that scholarly disregard for religion becomes, in Peter Coviello’s words, “a part of our untheorized and offhand real.” Such informally but intensely pedagogical moments bear inextricably scholarly implications and suggest that, if we wish to speak differently about religion, we should replace this implicit pedagogy of dismissing religion and reinstantiating secularism with an explicit pedagogy engaging the secular/religious binary. As a discipline, we need to take up religion in our literature classrooms in ways that dovetail with our operative methodologies, even as they catalyze and alter them, and that neither reboot the secularization thesis nor reify the secular/religious binary and, more important, that are helpful to our students, our society, and ourselves. The article then addresses a concrete example of how scholars from a range of methodologies can develop and implement such postsecular pedagogies.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83784744","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10088653
Timothy Larsen
This article explores the current state of biblical and theological literacy in the discipline of Victorian studies. It observes the ordinarily strong, careful, and impressive work done in recent decades, especially since some scholars have become interested in a postsecular approach to the field. It also, however, presents some egregious lapses in basic biblical and theological literacy that mar otherwise meticulous contemporary scholarship. This article hopes to open a conversation on how such glaring errors and misunderstandings have found their way into peer-reviewed work over and over again and to invite Victorian scholars to commit to finding ways to prevent this in the future.
{"title":"Biblical and Theological Literacy and Victorian Studies Today","authors":"Timothy Larsen","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10088653","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10088653","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article explores the current state of biblical and theological literacy in the discipline of Victorian studies. It observes the ordinarily strong, careful, and impressive work done in recent decades, especially since some scholars have become interested in a postsecular approach to the field. It also, however, presents some egregious lapses in basic biblical and theological literacy that mar otherwise meticulous contemporary scholarship. This article hopes to open a conversation on how such glaring errors and misunderstandings have found their way into peer-reviewed work over and over again and to invite Victorian scholars to commit to finding ways to prevent this in the future.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86366807","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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