A useful critical assessment of Victorian fairy art, literature, poetry, and photography, Nicola Bown's short, but robust, engagement with the major tA useful critical assessment of Victorian fairy art, literature, poetry, and photography, Nicola Bown's short, but robust, engagement with the major themes involving the presence (and absence) of fairies in the Victorian imagination is a must-read for all interested in the subfield. That being said, her reliance on Gillian Beer and now-outmoded "secularization theses" makes some of her claims regarding the presence of fairies in "disenchanting / secular" Victorian England severely misguided. Counter-examples abound of fairy story-tellers whose aim was not nostalgia or combating Darwinism, but for the sake of pedagogy, holdovers of Romanticism's rejection of the Enlightenment, or commentary on social injustice (see, for instance, the writings of George MacDonald, or William Morris). This trouble aside - and it does hamstring much of Bown's core thesis (for a new approach on the "secularization thesis," see Josephson-Storm's The Myth of Disenchantment) - Bown's discussion on the artworks at-hand is superlative, her intense research work resulting in the discussion of many obscure (to us) and/or forgotten works, and her other discussions on modernity and industrialism are all quite insightful and worthy to read....more
A short summation would be to say that Literature as Witness feels very confused about what constitutes effective literary criticism while proposing aA short summation would be to say that Literature as Witness feels very confused about what constitutes effective literary criticism while proposing a thesis that is, simply put, too large. The consequence is a book that meanders through five close-readings without tying together any substantial larger claim or academic assertion.
Radiant. This collection captures all the best glories of Marilynne Robinson's writings, discusses them handily, and then adds - as a cherry on the toRadiant. This collection captures all the best glories of Marilynne Robinson's writings, discusses them handily, and then adds - as a cherry on the top! - a conversation between her and the former Archbishop Rowan Williams and an interview with Robinson to boot!
My full review will be posted on Theologian's Library, but I strongly endorse this volume....more
As my final read for 2018, I just picked up this book from C.S. Lewis hoping that it would be enlightening and maybe a little enjoyable. I was incrediAs my final read for 2018, I just picked up this book from C.S. Lewis hoping that it would be enlightening and maybe a little enjoyable. I was incredibly surprised to be reminded (as I already knew) that Lewis was a remarkable scholar and knowledgeable literary mind in his own right, independent of all his "spiritual" works. The Discarded Image is a thoroughly enjoyable introduction to Medieval worldview from one of the greatest Medieval scholars of the past generation.
It also serves as a surprisingly useful companion to Lewis' Space Trilogy....more
Sometimes you need to take a quick break from whatever you're reading and down one of the shorter Greco-Roman works. A little whiles back I did this wSometimes you need to take a quick break from whatever you're reading and down one of the shorter Greco-Roman works. A little whiles back I did this with Cicero's De Officiis, and this week I decided to finally read Aristotle's Poetics.
It is pretty incredible how long-lasting this particular work of genre-criticism has been, even while its contents have been largely superseded by those who have written since. There are some a priori claims in, for instance, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy that find their home here in the Poetics. The Oxford World Classics edition, which I read, also includes a short selection of reception essays ranging from Sir Philip Sidney to Dorothy Sayers, which were quite enjoyable.
As for the Poetics themselves, I found Aristotle's little handbook surprisingly... ... .... practical! I'm not sure I've ever read a philosophy text (or literary criticism text) that I had found so... useful before. And, yet, I can see myself in writing - whether fiction or non-fiction - leaning into Aristotle's observations regarding discovery and reversal in tragedy. There is something universal to the effects of literature and art in general here!...more
Oh my goodness, y'all, this is a great collection of lectures / essays on George MacDonald! My full review can be found on Theologian's Library.Oh my goodness, y'all, this is a great collection of lectures / essays on George MacDonald! My full review can be found on Theologian's Library....more
For a long while I've been tossing about a Christian replacement for the hegemonic epistemology called "Cartesian Rationalism." For so many Christian For a long while I've been tossing about a Christian replacement for the hegemonic epistemology called "Cartesian Rationalism." For so many Christian writers, pastors, theologians, and public intellectuals, this constellation of "objectivity" serves as an authoritative bedrock upon which biblical belief is founded. Except, it's not. Cartesianism, Enlightenment Rationalism, scientistic objectivity are all both relatively new (since the mid-16th century) and, theologically, problematic for Christian faith. Epistemologically, these "modern" philosophies lead most naturally to... well... modernism, and all its fruit (liberal Protestantism being one of the most obvious of those fruit; speaking of its iteration in the middle part of the 20th century, of course).
Having dug its feet into the same grounds of modernism that the fundamentalists had rejected half-a-century before, most modern evangelicalism suffers from a crisis of epistemology when it comes to hermeneutics. While asserting a biblicism or Scripturism that makes the Word central, too often evangelicals live functionally with a self-authoritative, self-mediated doctrine of Scripture. One great case-study of this would be Pastor John MacArthur's forthcoming The Gospel According to God: as though the Scriptures themselves were not enough to mediate "the Gospel according to God."
But begin to peel back those hermeneutic layers, and one finds a crisis of epistemology: who mediates? how can we mediate? what makes an authoritative mediation? who has the "true" interpretation? It is no surprise that evangelical-raised young adults, upon arriving at college courses on writing and knowledge, find the skepticism of New Criticism so appealing. After all, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre didn't become famous philosophers for expostulating nonsense.
With the skills of an expositional philosopher, James K.A. Smith enters the fray ready to pick-apart the Platonic idealisms of all the popular hermeneutics of our day. He dismantles the evangelical accounts of immediacy, and then he turns his gaze to Heidegger and Derrida and reveals the errors in their own violence-mediated differance. Smith's adeptness at reading both theology (text and subtext; academic and popular) and philosophy comes to the fore in this work, allowing him full resources to disclose the errors in our hermeneutics of hermeneutics, whether we take the typical modernist (and evangelical?) or post-modernist (and atheist?) tacks on topics of (im)mediacy, the Fall, and "full" knowledge.
What he arrives with at the end is a re-reading of Augustine and Derrida pro-Creation and contra both the weak readings of their own texts (Smith's assault against "Searle's Derrida" is particularly delightful) as well as the hermeneutically-deficient Fallen accounts of reading. This rigorous Augustinianism, characteristic of Smith, makes a gorgeous case for the orthodoxy of post-/pre-modern thought contra-typical evangelicalism's corner of the market.
Altogether, The Fall of Interpretation is the answer for the problem of hermeneutics that I've been longing for. Again, Smith demonstrates that he's already answering the problems I'm contemplating; but I won't say I'm jealous about this one (see my review of Desiring the Kingdom for my jealousy! haha): teasing out the complexities of hermeneutics and epistemology through theology and philosophy looks like it was a lot of work. I'm glad Smith wrote this book!...more
At this juncture, I feel like I have become pretty familiar with Wendell Berry and his wide variety of skills. The man writes poetry, he farms, he criAt this juncture, I feel like I have become pretty familiar with Wendell Berry and his wide variety of skills. The man writes poetry, he farms, he critiques globalism and corporatism, he tells stories. These I have become fairly familiar with over the course of three-four months of rapacious reading. I feel like I have just experienced a graduate-level course in "The Thought of Wendell Berry"... and yet I still was not ready for the intelligent, savvy, powerful literary criticism discourse of Standing by Words.
To be sure, this collection of essays is no parallel in prowess to Berry's other masterworks; it lacks the sublimity of his poetry and the imagery of his prose. But, then again, literary criticism, despite what some of its proponents may think, is just not "sexy." It is an informative and critical art, and attempts to make literary criticism more artistic lead either to the perverse cycles of self-indulgence found in the Aestheticism movement (see Walter Pater's The Renaissance) or self-critical, meta-reflexive art that mock the genre (like postmodern literary master, Mark Z. Danielewski) without accomplishing its ends. Berry's commitment to an old-school of literary criticism serves him well.
Berry's unique ability to bring everything back to agrarianism is always surprising, and the standout final essay, "Poetry and Place," manages to do so by simultaneously honoring the work of Alexander Pope (to the surprise of many) and the dismantling of the work of Percy B. Shelley (to the surprise of absolutely no one). This re-reading of British Romanticism as against an "old order" of hierarchized nature is illuminating and valuable, especially since the current academic climate, which feels anemic toward Shelley and Wordsworth, is long overdue for an ecological overhaul when it comes to "dangerous terms" like "hierarchy" or "authority."
The essays here do a particular powerful work of asserting the goodness of particularized language, and claiming that generalized and de-particularized language is actually a social ill. This is powerful medicine, if received well. Altogether, I find Berry to be a stalwart proponent of something that we may call "pre-modernism"; and his rejection of both the modernist-industrialist West and of post-modernism's tendency towards the relative is refreshingly prophetic....more
As with all Wendell Berry works, this collection of essays is an odyssey, a journey through literary and physiographic landscapes with the intentions As with all Wendell Berry works, this collection of essays is an odyssey, a journey through literary and physiographic landscapes with the intentions of bringing together two powerful, but oft-disparate, worlds: Poetry and Geography, or, more accurately, Poetry and "the Land."
Berry's arguments for "the Local" are eloquent and well-spent on a task as esoteric as literary criticism. In some sense, I feel as though Berry here provides for the literary person a fine example of the purpose of literary criticism. Here we see no haughty critical-mindness whose purpose is to excoriate the author's hidden (Freudian) intentions; instead, we see a gregariousness and a graciousness that belies Berry's critical wit. He is a generous critic, and when he does speak critically it is always on-target and with the right spirit.
The vast majority of the essays in Imagination in Place are reflections on specific poets or specific poetry collections, in particular those who Berry knew personally from either his literary circles or his studies. He provides a great many poets for the young poetry-reader hungry for good literary work to discover and munch on; but even better he provides a localized reading of their work, tying the work of the poet to the land from which the poet works. There's a deep spirit-of-the-land resonant in the poets Berry discusses, as well as in Berry's thought, calling for a needfulness to the local author and artist (as opposed to our current artistic situation of centralized arts in New York, L.A., etc.).
As with all Berry writings, he inevitably turns each and every essay into a discussion of the ways our society is destroying its topsoil and its watersheds. But he never does so as a pariah; rather he does so as a well-read and articulate literati, who holds his calling as a farmer co-inherent with his calling as a poet. This indomitable and persevering will of environmental critique undergirds all of Berry's critical writings, demonstrating the needfulness of all poetic work.
A surprising addition to all these poetical interventions is a longer essay on As You Like It and King Lear. It feels a tad bit out-of-place in light of the more personal engagements surrounding it, but it reveals Berry's talented humanistic criticism nonetheless. Of all the essays, I found it to be the one more of the classical "literary criticism" genre, and perhaps one of the more enjoyable ones for those who are strangers to the other authors.
Altogether, this collection of essays reminds one that Berry is not just a poet and a farmer, but a true humanist of the classical tradition. And Berry reminds us humanists of the values and purposes of our critical work, as we have all-too-often neglected our telos in this modern day and age....more
In a day and age when the word "structuralism" is treated - inappropriately - with the same distrust as "Cartesian rationalism," it feels like ScholesIn a day and age when the word "structuralism" is treated - inappropriately - with the same distrust as "Cartesian rationalism," it feels like Scholes' overview of the philosophical movement's influence on literary theory is much needed. To escape structuralism is a foolish gesture in the modern academy, as our post-structuralist and deconstructionist tendencies are founded in its premises.
Scholes provides a suitable backdrop for the important moments of the field: Piaget, Lévi-Strauss, the Russian Formalists, Propp, Barthes, Genette, Bremond, and so on. He even brings to light a few of the lesser-known structuralist-narratologists like Souriau and Greimas whose influence is nevertheless still felt. In the last chapter, Scholes performs his own structural analysis on the British Romantics and Ulysses - two subjects that test the structuralist hypothesis. His analysis is actually quite sustainable! In so doing, Scholes masterfully counters the argument that structuralism is "dry scientism", and brings to light the hidden poetry of the method.
My one grumbling with the book - and this is true for most other summations of structuralist thought as well - is his handling of Lévi-Strauss. By overemphasizing the conclusion of Lévi-Strauss' "Structural Approach to Myth", he misses out on the more exciting conversation the French anthropologist brings regarding myth and language - something that Barthes would later emphasize as well in his "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative." This common misreading - in my opinion - of the Lévi-Strauss essay unfortunately diminishes the value of his influence on structuralism as a whole. The bibliography corrects this, in a way, but briefly and fleetingly.
Altogether, Scholes collection is a useful starting point for those interested in narrative theory and modern structuralism. It provides all of the necessary background....more
It seems most striking to the postmodern reader how Propp in his scientific way still holds true. Somehow his morphological analysis denies a generaliIt seems most striking to the postmodern reader how Propp in his scientific way still holds true. Somehow his morphological analysis denies a generalizing relativism, which gives one hope for a general method of literary analysis (something that his antecedents have certainly worked for!).
This is not the most exciting book you've ever read - even amidst Formalism and Structuralism, there other way more interesting books - but it is both one of the most foundational and one of the most significant. If you're interested in modern implications, I recommend checking out Claude Bremond!...more
Loading...
