Theology and Literature after Postmodernity

Zoë Lehmann Imfeld, Peter Hampson, Alison Milbank, Zoë Lehmann Imfeld, Peter Hampson, Alison Milbank

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780567672056
• eBook ISBN:
  9780567654953
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Theologie

This volume deploys theology in a reconstructive approach to contemporary literary criticism, to validate and exemplify theological readings of literary texts as a creative exercise. It engages in a dialogue with interdisciplinary approaches to literature in which theology is alert and responsive to the challenges following postmodernism and postmodern literary criticism. It demonstrates the scope and explanatory power of theological readings across various texts and literary genres. Theology and Literature after Postmodernity explores a reconstructive approach to reading and literary study in the university setting, with contributions from interdisciplinary scholars worldwide.

Part One

Pedagogy

1

Religion, History, and Faithful Reading

Susannah Brietz Monta

University of Notre Dame, IN, USA

I began my career in two American public universities, where the United States’ constitutional separation of church and state meant sequestering religion as personal, not pertaining to public, or classroom, discourse. When I taught passages from the Qur’an in a medieval literature course, one of my students – a practising Muslim – tiptoed carefully: ‘some would say’, he would offer, or ‘usually it is taught that’. Never ‘I think’ or ‘I believe’: such statements violate the public classroom’s decorum. When I moved to the University of Notre Dame, a private, religiously affiliated institution, the separation of church and state no longer applied. In the first course I taught there, an honours humanities survey, I assigned books 10 and 11 of Augustine’s Confessions, in which Augustine reflects on time, memory, and eternity, and offers a dazzling phenomenology of mind. One student, a member of the university’s football team, responded enthusiastically, explaining to his somewhat befuddled colleagues that ‘Augustine thinks time is a distention of human consciousness’. (I note that distentio is the word Augustine uses.) My student stated that he’d worked hard to understand the text because ‘it answers a question I’ve always had’. Augustine mattered not only for the history of autobiography, or philosophy, or theology, but for his life; Augustine spoke to him now, addressing his concerns about time and eternity. My student’s position vis-à-vis the text was not studied neutrality but thoughtful receptivity.

Contrast this student’s reading with a scene from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, in which the character Malvolio performs bad literary criticism. Malvolio happens upon a letter supposedly written by his employer, the Countess Olivia. Unbeknownst to him, the letter is a trick designed by Olivia’s serving woman Maria to gull Malvolio into performing ‘impossible passages of grossness’ (III.ii.64). Before finding the letter, Malvolio indulges in grandiose daydreams of the power that a marriage to Olivia would bring. The letter seemingly confirms his fantasies: ‘M.O.A.I. doth sway my life’ (II.5.106). Malvolio sees himself in these letters, but the reflection is imperfect; as he notes, ‘M’ begins his name, but the other letters do not follow in sequence.1 Still, our interpreter is not deterred: ‘yet, to crush this a little, it would bow to me, for every one of these letters are in my name’ (II.5.132–3). Malvolio’s self-absorption rides roughshod over the text’s ambiguities. His is an error, partly, of positioning: the positioning of the reader above the text, here in nearly violent terms (‘crush this a little’). Is it possible to attend to literature’s implications for the here-and-now, as my student did, while avoiding the distortions of self-absorbed textual ‘crushing’? And what might readers’ positionings reveal about the study of religion and literature in the contemporary academy?

In this essay, I suggest that literary studies’ habit of placing religion at a safe historical remove from the one who reads has affected our relation to the material we study and, paradoxically, our ability to read historically, or at least to read as our predecessors typically did. I first offer a brief account of ways in which religion has been configured in relation to literary study, focusing especially on the methods of historicism that have dominated US literary study over the past few decades. I then return to Twelfth Night, a play whose characters use religious language to talk about relation itself. The play has much to teach us about relating to the texts we study in good faith, by allowing them their own integrity, but daring too to risk receptivity, to implicate ourselves in our readings.

Disciplinary contexts

In the United States, the academic study of religion and literature was housed from the 1950s in programmes such as the Ph.D. in Theology and Literature at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School and a similar program within the University of Virginia’s Department of Religious Studies. Larry Bouchard explains the two very different rationales behind these programmes. The first was that of comparative cultural history: as a matter of historical fact, religious and literary histories intersected with one another, so that proper study of religion entailed literary study, and vice versa. The second was that of a literary phenomenology of religion.2 That is, even when modern literature has thrown off the religion of its past, it may, to quote Nathan Scott, ‘by the very radicality of its unbelief, awaken sensibilities of a contrary order’, and become ‘an instrument of religious recovery’.3 Such scholarship often disclosed literary texts’ religious dimensions – Christ figures, prodigal son narratives – in order to elaborate Christian ideas. This scholarship’s theology was robust, its interpretations sophisticated. Yet it was accused of subordinating imaginative texts’ literary features to its theological and apologetic aims.

In a later generation, scholarship continued in this vein but met a counter-current. Theologians such as David Jasper and John Caputo put theology into contact with literary theory, psychoanalysis, and continental philosophy. This work tended to use literary theory as a solvent on reified dogma, opening theology to lively, speculative forms of writing. The sense of the ‘literary’ became either broadened or diffuse, depending upon one’s point of view; close readings were traded for theological and philosophical discussions focused by literary texts, including biblical literature. There is considerable precedent for such an approach; Kierkegaard’s excursus on the near-sacrifice of Isaac in Fear and Trembling is but one prominent example.

Neither approach made many inroads into the US academy’s language and literature departments, the primary settings for literary study. The relative impermeability of mainstream literary studies to religion and literature scholarship stems from a long-standing, if now weakening, assumption that secularity was tantamount to objectivity, and that objectivity in literary study is both possible and desirable. Gerald Graff argues that American literary studies valued secularity and objectivity from the start of its institutional life.4 In 1883, at the first meeting of the Modern Language Association, the dominant American association for literary study, H.C.G. Brandt claimed that ‘a scientific basis dignifies our profession’.5 At Harvard in 1876, the philologist Francis James Child introduced a course on Shakespeare’s plays and another on four major British writers: Chaucer, Milton, Dryden – and Francis Bacon.6 Bacon presumably lent the prestige of scientific empiricism to literary study.

The preference for objectivity and secularity has ideological, even religious, roots. As Tracy Fessenden has argued, efforts to elevate particular forms of Protestant identity drove the gradual secularization of the American public sphere.7 Propriety and public decorum seemed to require separating religious enthusiasms from intellectual pursuit. Until fairly recently, what Ken Jackson and others have called ‘Whiggish’ secularity has governed, often silently, literary study in the American academy.8 This paradigm’s dominance exacts a price: Lori Branch maintains that the privileging of objectivity and secularism’s supposed neutrality cuts short literary studies’ own insights about the contingent, constructed nature of language. If we took those insights to their logical conclusions, Branch argues, we would acknowledge that the use of language always requires belief, in acts of interpretation, in the construction of meaning, and in relation to others.9

Within the American academy, there have always been scholars who have studied literature in relation to historical manifestations of religion – Donne’s devotional lyrics alongside Calvinist teachings about grace and election, for example. Yet the latter part of the twentieth century was, notoriously, not a fruitful time for the study of religion and literature within mainstream literature departments. The dominance of a hermeneutics of suspicion – whereby religion masks ideologies of oppression – meant that religion was most often read as fundamentally about something else: power, economic substructures, gendered hierarchies, etc.10 John Cox has argued that the hermeneutics of suspicion occluded the fact that for many early modern authors, including Shakespeare, suspicion and scepticism were in the service of and derived from, not opposed to, faith.11 At its founding, a leading organization of 1990s vintage, the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, asserted a focus on race, gender, class, and sexuality. Note what is missing (remarkably for a group studying the Reformation era): religion. In 1991, Debora Shuger wrote that religion was not simply about politics but also about matters of the soul (often in relation to, but not reducible to, politics), and that we do early modern people a disservice not to read their religious discourses in earnest, as if they knew what they were talking about. The shock waves were palpable.12

In the 1990s, a shift began, one presaging a broadening and deepening of literary scholars’ engagements with religion. Witness the ‘turn’ to religion in continental philosophy and literary theory, entailing a study of the Pauline epistles for their implications for contemporary ethics, or the reinvigorated study of historical forms of religion in fields that long distanced themselves from traditional religion, such as English Romanticism.13 This is not to say that literary studies has moved closer to theology necessarily. As recent articles in Religion and Literature witness, there is an ongoing tension in religion and literature scholarship between historical studies of religion and literature in culturally specific manifestations and the more speculative mode of reading literature for the ways it helps us think theology and reflect on ultimate things, ultimate questions.14 For that speculative work to gain credence in literature and language departments, it must do its historical homework. And that homework need not be anti- or a-theological. The Gospel of John’s vertiginous opening asserts that the Word has come in words particular to a certain place and culture; the opening of Luke 2 locates the incarnation in place, time, and circumstance. The Bible’s revelations are mediated by the genres, grammars, and vocabularies of specific cultures. Thus in Genesis 3, famously, two Hebrew words offer a play on ‘cunning’ (‘arum) – the characteristic of the snake – and ‘naked’ (‘arumim): Adam and Eve think they will gain cunning by eating the fruit, but instead realize only their nakedness.

The assumption that time-bound histories, languages, and literatures may disclose ultimate things also undergirds Christianity’s exemplary im...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Series
• Contents
• Foreword Stanley Hauerwas
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 Pedagogy
• Part 2 Theological and Literary Reconstructions
• Index
• Copyright