Teaching Marilynne Robinson, Democracy and the Mystery of American Belonging Through the Post-Christian Eyes of Millennial Brits: “Homesick for a place I never left”

Abstract

This chapter explores the challenges of teaching Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004) to British undergraduates. Robinson’s work wrestles and recuperates the apparently contradictory legacies of Puritan and Transcendentalist thought. Tate argues that the intellectual generosity embodied in Robinson’s work is subversive and a crucial challenge to contemporary British sensibilities. The theological richness of her writing offers a particular pedagogical challenge in an apparently post-Christian culture, one in which it can no longer be taken for granted that biblical tropes will be recognized or regarded as meaningful, especially for a contemporary European readership born in the late twentieth or early twenty-first century. Robinson’s “Gilead” narrative sequence emphasizes the validity of embracing the mystery of everyday life and might be read as a distinctively American defense of liberalism and religious tolerance. In The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998), Robinson observes that “[d]emocracy is profoundly collaborative. It implies a community. It seems to me we have almost stopped using the word in a positive sense.” Tate explores the challenges of addressing questions of religious belief, selfhood and race in contemporary fiction and in the context of twenty-first-century British higher education.