Abstract
Radical theology continues and challenges the parallels and legacies of religion and literature in its relationships to imagination. Although radical theologians most often identify as Christian, for many, imaginative literature is more central to their arguments than a re-evaluation of scripture or doctrine. Religion, scripture, and theology are historically rooted in the idea of God-authored stories and part of what radical theologians tend to do is to question traditional narratives; they cast doubt on clear authorship, pure origins, and teleological progressions to promised ends. This chapter examines radical theology’s engagement with modernist literature over the second half of the twentieth century before proposing new, alternative directions for future radical theologies of literature.
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- 1.
Thomas J.J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 7.
- 2.
“Deconstruction and the Other,” in Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, ed. R. Kearney (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984), 104.
- 3.
Altizer and Hamilton (1966), 168.
- 4.
Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale UP, 1952).
- 5.
John Elson, “Is God Dead?,” in Time (8 April 1966).
- 6.
Altizer and Hamilton (1966), ix.
- 7.
Ibid., 6.
- 8.
Ibid., xi.
- 9.
Ibid., 171.
- 10.
Ibid., 185.
- 11.
Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1993), 39, emp. add.
- 12.
Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign, 2nd ed. (New York: Fordham UP, 2000), 296.
- 13.
Mark C. Taylor, Erring (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1984), 7.
- 14.
Ibid., 100.
- 15.
Ibid., 105.
- 16.
Ibid., 108.
- 17.
Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous (New York: Vintage, 1990), 202.
- 18.
David Tracy, “Fragments,” in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, eds. J. Caputo and M. Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999), 174.
- 19.
Ibid., 179.
- 20.
Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ, ed. C. Davis (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2009), 43.
- 21.
John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, After the Death of God, ed. J. Robbins (New York: Columbia UP, 2007), 66.
- 22.
Ibid., 60.
- 23.
Thomas J.J. Altizer, History as Apocalypse (Albany: SUNY P, 1985), 237.
- 24.
Thomas A. Carlson, “And Maker Mates with Made: World and Self-Creation in Eriugena and Joyce,” in Secular Theology: American Radical Theological Thought, ed. C. Crockett (London: Routledge, 2001), 149; James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Penguin, 1999), 143, 3.
- 25.
Joyce, 185; James S. Atherton, The Books at the Wake (Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois UP, 1979), 28.
- 26.
Joyce, 378.
- 27.
Ibid., 192.
- 28.
Ibid., 356.
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Erickson, G. (2018). Literature. In: Rodkey, C., Miller, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96595-6_45
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