Abstract
This study intends to undertake questions of narrative in modern literary texts by engaging the interdisciplinary field of religion and literature. In so doing, the work reflects recent developments in literary theory, especially those emanating from discussions of reader-response criticism and hermeneutics. I wish to look at certain of those works, as J Hillis Miller recently put it, ‘which disrupt the minds of their readers and shape them anew’.4
There will always be an Other, or the dream of otherness. Literature is the form that dream takes in an enlightened mind.1
The limns are experienced.2
Learning to read novels, we slowly learn to read ourselves.3
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Notes
Geoffrey Hartman, Beyond Formalism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970) p. x.
Justis George Lawler, Celestial Pantomime: Poetic Structures of Transcendence (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979) p. 41.
Mark Schorer, ‘An Interpretation’, in Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier (New York: Vintage Books, 1951) p. v.
J. Hillis Miller, review of The Interpretation of Otherness, by Giles Gunn, in Journal of Religion, 62 (July 1982) p. 303.
Philip Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain: A Study in the Language of Symbolism (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1954) p. 8.
Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975) p. 9.
Peter L. Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1979) p. 161.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981) p. 142.
Vernon Ruland, S.J., Horizons of Criticism: An Assessment of Religious—Literary Options (Chicago, Ill.: American Library Association, 1975) p. 117.
Paul Brodtkorb, Ishmael’s White World: A Phenomenological Reading of ‘Moby Dick’ (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965) p. 53.
Richard H. Brodhead, Hawthorne, Melville and the Novel (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1976) p. 154.
William T. Noon, S.J., Joyce and Aquinas (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959) p. 74.
Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976) p. 261.
Nathan Scott, The Poetics of Belief (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1985) p. 3.
Peter S. Hawkins, The Language of Grace: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Iris Murdoch (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 1983) p. 117.
Giles Gunn, The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) p. 85.
J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Representation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982) pp. 19–20.
John Coulson, ‘Religion and Imagination (Relating Religion and Literature)’, in David Jasper (ed.), Images of Belief in Literature (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1984) p. 19.
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© 1993 David Scott Arnold
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Arnold, D.S. (1993). The Reader’s Share in the Narrative Events of Religion and Literature. In: Liminal Readings. Studies in Literature and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22466-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22466-1_1
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