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Summer 2008: Table of Contents
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LiteratureBack to top
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The Procession of Allusions to God In British Poetry From The Beginning: God’s Acts And The Response Of Poets
Rob Blain
Abstract
The human heart enjoys this glorious world and all wonders of nature and mankind and the mind thinks, “The scope of it is beyond me.” ‘Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is too high for me, I cannot attain unto it.’” We sense what is beyond us. We are reminded, “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp / Or what’s a heaven for?”
It is no surprise, then, that references to God in English prose and poetry are abundant from the earliest times. “Caedmon’s Hymn” recorded by The Venerable Bede in 731 A.D. and “The Dream of the Rood” were typical early expressions. These early references to God go from “Beowulf,” to “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” “The Canterbury Tales” and beyond. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, Layamon and Mallory set Arthurian legends in deeply Christian society. For many scholars, devotional poetry reached its zenith in the poetry of John Donne and George Herbert. Donne is more and widely celebrated because of his brilliance and wit, for example, in “The Ecstasy” and “Holy Sonnet 14,” but Herbert’s poetry is even more sublime, inspiring imitators and admirers for centuries. The procession of allusions to God in British poetry elevates the reader and hearer and goes on through the modern era.
“What in me is dark/ Illumine”(PL 1:22-23): The “Other” body of Samson Agonistes
Jane Lilly Fernandez
Abstract
At the heart of Samson Agonistes lies a constellation of losses that cannot be overcome by any virtue that critics may accrue for Samson’s ‘heroic’ end. I wish to investigate the nature and significance of these losses to demonstrate how the text collapses, builds and overextends itself, and in so doing, anticipates its Other: a new paradigm of “peace and consolation” (‘SA’ 1757). What can we make of the wilful death of a colossal giant like Samson, whose image tutored, crafted and developed through concepts of ‘consecrated’ violence, ends his life embroiled in the spoils of his own carnage?
Accepting that the grand close of the Samson drama lies in the force of its narrative imagery, which powerfully depicts for us the colluding of two ideologically opposed worlds we must ask, what have we missed here?! What is the ideological breach/excess scripted in Samson’s mutilated frame? How can the text be retrieved to ‘illuminate’ for us the trajectories of our dark histories? How can the text lead us to the pregnant Silence, the Stillness encrypted in the in-between spaces of the text’s framing, to enable, encourage and facilitate a purposeful and energetic ‘pursuit of global religious accord’.
George Eliot’s enthusiastic bachelors: topical fictional accounts of nineteenth-century homoerotic Christian masculinities and the manhood question
Dennis S. Gouws
Abstract
The early modern British bachelor was loosely and negatively defined, and his nineteenth-century descendant’s perceived selfishness and luxury evidently concerned his society and its authors because his position vis-à-vis the manhood question was unclear. The manhood question considers how a boy or a man might grow into and sustain a meaningful, productive, and commendable type of manhood. The nineteenth-century British bachelor’s transitional or peripheral relationship with heteronormative manhood; which valued marriage, children, and work; was topical because of his ambiguous social value and bodily potential; his responsibilities and his desire were not necessarily subject to those prescriptions that constrained married men. Both Platonic and Christian forms of enthusiasm permitted homoerotic same-sex friendships; consequently, an enthusiastic bachelorhood intensified societal ambivalence about bachelors. Victorian society lamented the unconventional homoerotic potential of a bachelor manhood enabled by an enthusiastic Christian vocation.
Because they most notably challenge the integrity of her moral realism, the most interesting of George Eliot’s Christian bachelors exemplify an enthusiasm-enabled, potentially transgressive manhood. Seth Bede and Dino de Bardi respectively exemplify potentially homoerotic evangelical and Catholic bachelorhood. Eliot reconciles them to the heteronormative world of her fiction first, by acknowledging in code their potentially homoerotic bachelorhood (without permitting them to influence the values of this fictional world) and second, by reproducing in her fiction those heteronormative conventional protocols of bachelor domestication and homoerotic containment. Silas Marner and Savonarola positively model these protocols, but I suggest that Eliot’s coding possibly enabled rather than contained enthusiastic homoerotic aestheticism.
A Tragic Optimism: The Existential Vacuum and God in the Poetic Vision
Barbara A. Heavilin and Charles W. Heavilin
Abstract
In Man’s Search for Meaning psychiatrist Viktor Frankl diagnoses the malaise of humankind as an “existential vacuum,” a sense of meaninglessness. He suggests that help for this malaise may be found in creativity, love, and the freedom of moral choice. Whether acknowledged or not, these human gifts are reflections of God, of a higher way––or what Frankl calls “another dimension, ….the capacity to rise above conditions.”2 But how and where is help to be sought and found if God Himself seems absent, thus compounding the perceived emptiness and lack of meaning?
This feeling that God is absent manifests itself in literature by a shift from a recognized spiritual dimension to one that focused primarily on the social. After Milton’s 1667 publication of Paradise Lost with its lofty intent “to justify the ways of God to men,” an age of satire ensued, with the aim of bringing about social reform by using a metaphorical mirror to reflect and illuminate the foibles of humankind, often with the hope of reform but sometimes with the fatalistic view that humankind is beyond redemption. This shift in focus from considering the mind of God to contemporary social ills resulted in a body of poetry wherein God largely disappears from the scene––a reflection of a shifting scientific and philosophical bent towards empirical verification of “truth” and a skeptical view of faith and mystery. Nevertheless, the poetic vision still celebrates God’s presence in its portrayal of the human capacity for creativity, love, and the freedom of moral choice even in the harshest circumstances.
The Agnostic Musings of African American Popular Novelist Frank Garvin Yerby
James L. Hill
Born and reared in Augusta Georgia, the heart of the Bible Belt in the American South, Frank Garvin Yerby began his literary career writing black protest fiction in the tradition of Richard Wright, and like many of his contemporaries, he demonstrated conventional religious thought in his early fiction. In the 1940s, however, Yerby abruptly switched from protest to popular fiction. In this historic transition, Yerby modified his protest aim and artistic consciousness, becoming one of America’s most avid debunkers of history and myth. Concurrently, with the cumulative effects of his personal experiences as an African American, especially in the South, undergirded by his prodigious research of the history of cultures across the world, Yerby began questioning conventional religious beliefs in his anti-heroic popular novels; and in fact, he actually developed philosophical assumptions and beliefs that counter Christian theology.
Through an examination of general references to religion in Yerby’s fiction and a close reading of two of his most important novels, An Odor of Sanctity and Judas, My Brother, this presentation analyzes Yerby’s agnosticism and his philosophical assumptions and beliefs. A novel about ancient Spain, Yerby's adopted country, An Odor of Sanctity presents the familiar literary prototype of the Christ figure. The protagonist of the novel, Alaric Teudisson, is a picaresque saint who underscores Yerby’s messages that saints are not fanatics who disavow all religions other than their own and that man’s godliness is the love he shows for his fellowman and the compassion he develops out of his own suffering. Judas, My Brother, on the other hand, continues the philosophical investigations prevalent in Yerby’s earlier novels. Using the fictional technique of contrasting characters, Yerby portrays the lives of two characters, the Prophet Jesus and his counterpart Nathan. Written to demythologize the origins of Christianity, Judas, My Brother documents evens and details of history that Yerby considers contrary to the popular conceptions of Christianity; and included in this novel are twenty-eight pages of footnotes to substantiate Yerby’s agnosticism and philosophical claims.
Cosmopoetics and Politics: Were Those “Unacknowledged Legislators of the World" Actually Women?
Julie L. Smith-Hubbard
I begin with Virginia Woolf’s “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.” In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf theorizes that “we think back through our [literary] mothers, if we are women.” Mary Wollstonecraft, in her eighteenth-century A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, advocates for a woman’s right to education and asks for the education of both sexes. Today, I see Wollstonecraft’s inheritors in Assia Djebar and Mahasweta Devi, women who are educating all of us while calling for political awareness and action. I use the term “Cosmopoetics” to define generally the nature of their aesthetics and to suggest specifically “how [their] contemporary narratives [which are worldwide rather than provincial in scope] determine and change readers’ ‘comprehensions of cultural differences.’”
The Private Servant, the Public Servant, and the “Good and Faithful Servant” in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend
Linda M. Lewis
Abstract:
Charles Dickens’s basis for morality is Christianity—“the teachings of our great Master.” In Our Mutual Friend Dickens creates a moral fable based upon Jesus’ parable of the Good and Faithful Servant, who receives praise and profit from his Master. The working-class Nicodemus Boffin serves as literary portrait of this good, faithful servant, while his employees, a faithful and faithless servant, receive dissimilar rewards for loyalty and disloyalty. Dickens applies the parable not only in business but also in government: when the shallow Veneering stands for election to the Commons, other connotations of work (campaigning) and disservice (graft) are introduced to parallel the cases of employees in business. As Boffin and his workers illustrate Jesus’ parable and Thomas Carlyle’s Gospel of Work in employer/employee relationships, Veneering and his associates parody them in the citizen/politician realm.
The Silence of God in the Modern Catholic Novel: Graham Greene and French Catholic Novelists Adopting a Pascalian Deus Absconditus Perspective on Faith, Truth and Reason
Anne Loddegaard
Abstract:
The paper examines the religious and aesthetic modernity of the interwar and post war Catholic novel using a combined narratological and Pascalian approach. The Catholic novels of Graham Greene, Julien Green, Franςois Mauriac and Georges Bernanos are often connected with the literary Catholic revival emerging in the 1880s. I insist, however, that the modern, open Catholic novel emerging after the First World War and based on a Pascalian Deus Absconditus must be distinguished from the traditional, closed novel of the revival (1880-1914), which displays a providential God communicating through divinely omniscient narrators. In the modern Catholic novel, the Pascalian Deus Absconditus implies that the believer’s confinement to an uncertain, human perspective produces/shapes religious open-mindedness and tolerance. The analysis of Graham Greene’s Catholic novels aims at showing how the “pascalisation” of the modern Catholic novel is established through modernist narrative techniques (characterization, plot, narrative voice and focalisation), and that the very modernity of Greene’s Catholic novels to a great extent is indebted to Blaise Pascal’s Pensées from 1670.
God of Our Yankees: The Evolution of God in Robert Frost
Nancy Nahra
Abstract
This paper presents evidence that a sharp contrast exists in the use of the term “God” in the work of Robert Frost: that difference corresponds to a divide between the poet’s considerable body of lyric poems and his late dramatic work. In its methodology this report applies a straightforward philological practice of identifying, analyzing, and comparing instances of use of the term. Comparison of “God” in the lyric poems and in two of Frost’s dramatic works, A Masque of Reason (1945) and A Masque of Mercy (1947), suggests nothing less than an unexpected evolution in the poet’s understanding of God.
Creator and Fallen Angel: The Christian Atheism of Mark Twain
Diane M. Plotkin
The writings of Mark Twain range from humor to heresy. They are witty, wise, sardonic and satirical. Influenced by Darwin and Freud, he questions the role of man-and God-in the greater universe. Analyzing the structural problem of the writings of his later years, Fussell notes that these in these works, particularly in The Mysterious Stranger, Twain’s
…philosophic position… can be described as a grotesque medley of fatalism, misanthropy and cynicism…’which reflect the post Darwinian pessimism of the late nineteenth century…’ They include ‘the use of an inverted “Great Chain of Being” concept…attacks on the “Moral Sense”… and contempt for human reason and dignity…( Fussell, 1976) .The darker tone of his later works is also influenced by his religious beliefs-or lack thereof, as well as by several adversities in his life.
Introducing Charlotte Mason’s Use of Narration
J. Carroll Smith
Abstract
This article makes the claim that as public policy is made about very young children particularly in an educational setting, oracy needs to be strongly considered because of the implications it has on future reading development. The author reviews some of the research literature on oral language development and its impact on reading in school. Following this review and after making a connection among intellect, language and environment the British educationalist Charlotte Mason is introduced. Reviewing narration as an instructional strategy, the author explores the usefulness of narration and its effects on learning. Brown and Cambourne claim that narrating has many advantages for the learner. After discussing these advantages the author suggest ways to disseminate knowledge of the research on oral language and narration to those who work with our very young children.
Flannery O’Connor’s Quest
Mattie Daniels Thomas
Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, written in the mid-twentieth century, depicts grotesque characters who are hard of hearing and almost spiritually blind. Consequently, violence is often used to foster their spirituality. In Mystery and Manners, O’Connor describes her Christian belief as “the engine that makes her perception operate” (109) Such a statement may cause the reader to expect a direct emphasis on religious matters in her fiction, but she generally depicts a world characterized by greed, pride and a lack of moral vision. The tension between what the writer says and what she portrays in her stories produces a need to reconcile her Christian faith with what John Hawkes calls the devil’s voice in her fiction (“Flannery O’Connor’s Devil” 396).
“Ancient Wisdom” to “Supreme Fiction”: Ideas of God in the Poetry of H.D. and Wallace Stevens
Heather Harrison Thomas
Abstract
Modernist American poets H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Wallace Stevens struggled differently to come to terms with the idea of God, yet both pursued a skeptical inquiry of desire. Each enacted a transformative poetics that invests poetry itself with religious value. Addressing the spiritually dead and embattled modern moment in need of rebirth, H.D. developed a revelatory poetics rooted in ancient mysticism that reclaimed for the 20th century a lost female divinity hidden beneath the overarching structure of patriarchal religion. She mediated between the old Judeo-Christian binaries that would separate body and soul, spirit and matter, devaluing one for the other. Stevens used imagination as the instrument of mediation between the idea of God as central to poetry, and modernity’s movement away from this idea. He transformed the spiritual desire for God, learned from his mother, into a sacred-secular delight in harmonious order. Poetry itself, his “supreme fiction,” came to offer the consolations of religion as a substitute for God. The crucial cultural work of these poets during the fractious era of modernism opened paths that we might consider today in efforts to construct a compassionate discourse and seek common ground during the struggle for global accord.
The Cleric and the Lady: The Affair of Lady Byron and F.W. Robertson
Marilyn Thomas
I thought I knew all the world would ever know about Lady Byron when I heard a rumor while on sabbatical at Oxford University. The rumor was not about her, but about a man who would reveal himself as having been an intimate friend of hers, F.W. Robertson, a once-prominent Victorian cleric. According to the rumor, he, a married man with two children, confessed in his diary, which was supposedly written in secret code, to having “affairs with the women of Brighton.” I was conducting my search for this diary when I found a letter penned in 1846, a letter that remains in private hands, a letter that corrects all biographical accounts regarding when Robertson met Lady Byron, he a charismatic public speaker, a man of God, a man who was so handsome that women were known to faint if he so much as smiled at them, (Brooke, 1865) a man whom the Dictionary of National Biography describes as follows: “There is perhaps no parallel in English church history to the influence of Robertson’s six years’ ministry at a small proprietary chapel.” The Dictionary account continues: “Robertson, whose character in all parts that were comprehended within the region of morality, was not only stainless but exalted, nevertheless suffered from some minor defects disastrous in his public position—fiery vehemence, exaggerated sensitiveness, and an entire lack of humour.” (Sidney Lee).
Heaven in a grain of sand—Patrick White’s Contemporary Vision
Cynthia vanden Driesen
Abstract
Australia’s Nobel Prize-winning writer, Patrick White, has unequivocally stated: “Religion—that’s behind all my novels….” He remains acutely aware of the challenge before a writer with such preoccupations in the context of the contemporary world and his writing strategies present a range of subtleties designed, it would appear, to negotiate the challenges its dominant secular ethos . The dismissal of the religious stance as irrational is undermined in these texts by the consistent projection of the irrational as a source of valuable cognitive experience. Indeed the overvaluing of the rational faculties is shown to cripple the human spirit. Against the charge of the evasion of human realities, the religious experience is shown to be deeply imbricated in the mundane realities of ordinary existence. White’s evocative style of writing exploits all the suggestiveness of image and symbol and the devices of poetry to enforce an acceptance of his vision of human experience as innately involved with a transcendental religious dimension. Most interesting is the nature of White’s “saints.” They are all sinners first, conscious of the flaws of their imperfect natures. Spiritual understanding is grasped through embracing the mundane realties of ordinary existence, not an ascetic withdrawal from it. Mystical experiences are projected as a kind of seeing deeper into the phenomenal world rather than an escape into transcendence. White’s saints attain understanding of transcendental mysteries through immersion in the gritty realities of the mundane world. White’s novels project a Blakean vision of “Heaven in a grain of sand.”
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