Narrative, Religion and Science: Fundamentalism Versus Irony, 1700-1999

ISBN-13: 9780521811361 / Angielski / Twarda / 2002 / 290 str.

Stephen Prickett

Opis

An increasing number of contemporary scientists, philosophers and theologians downplay their professional authority and describe their work as simply "telling stories about the world." If this is so, literary criticism can and should be applied to all these fields. Yet story telling is neither innocent nor empty-handed. Register, rhetoric, and imagery all manipulate in their own ways. Above all, irony emerges as the natural mode of our modern fragmented culture. Since the eighteenth century there have been only two possible ways of understanding the world--the fundamentalist and the ironic.

Recenzje

'Written with wit and verve … It is the best kind of popular cultural thinking, helping the educated lay person to hold together a range of 'stories' from the last three hundred years of the cultural history of the West … this is an attractive and stimulating book' Theology

Spis treści

Introduction: Arthur Dent, Screwtape, and the mysteries of story telling; 1. Post-modernism, grand narratives, and Just-So stories; 2. Newton and Kissinger: science as irony?; 3. Learning to say 'I': literature and subjectivity; 4. Reconstructing religion: fragmentation, typology and symbolism; 5. The ache in the missing limb: language, truth, and presence; 6. Twentieth-century fundamentalisms: theology, truth, and irony; 7. Science and religion: language, metaphor, and consilience; Concluding observational postscript: the tomb of Napoleon; Bibliography.