Theology and Literature: Rethinking Reader Responsibility

ISBN-13: 9781403971982 / Angielski / Twarda / 2006 / 240 str.

Gaye Williams Ortiz; Clara A. B. Joseph

Opis

This collection of new essays by academics from different parts of the world brings refreshing and provocative responses to prominent literary theories, especially theories of the reading process and of reader-response. This edition is significant in three ways: for its encounter with world religions and literatures; its explicit literary cum theological discourse; and its strong focus on the ethics of reading and representation. It boasts an impressive multidisciplinary array of reader-response theories that straddle theological, cultural, and literary boundaries. The essays showcase a combination of theory and hands-on application on literary and cultural texts.

Recenzje

"Theology needs the literary imagination and, indeed, will not survive without it. However, a responsible imagination is never imagination for imagination's sake, for it is connected to the gendered, ethnic, class, national, and postcolonial realities of identity, of real people living in the world. The essays collected here show where, when, and how the creative forces of literature can meet theology, and how such an intersection makes a difference for that practical mode of thinking we call ethics." - S. Brent Plate, author of Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics, editor of Religion, Art, and Visual Culture

"These essays in Theology and Literature enable their reader to discover how a strongly centrifugal effect, produced by a rich array of texts, locations, and issues, can coincide with the centripetal effect of securing reading as moral, spiritual practice." - Professor Wesley A. Kort, Chair, Department of Religion, Duke University

"In this new millennium, where the question of responsibility personal, corporate, national, global hits us with new force, the old jouissance of textual engagement has given way to a renewed ethical imperative. It is reassuring to see a volume like this take seriously the question of reading, and indeed writing, responsibly, not by tossing out the last fifty years, but by provoking us into new ways of appropriating the textual concerns of yesterday for the new ethical demands of today. This is a timely and important book, therefore: diverse in its range of genre and tradition, yet singular in its focus on what it means to be responsible with the texts and theories that we have inherited and that we now employ." - Andrew W. Hass, University of Stirling

Spis treści

On Reader Responsibility: An Introduction; C.A.B.Joseph & G.W.Ortiz A Theory of Ethical Reading Some Dilemmas of an Ethics of Literature; L.K.Altes Reading and the Biblical Only Irresponsible People Would Go into the Desert for Forty Days: Jim Crace's Quarantine or The Diary of Another Madman; D.Jasper The Ethics of Biblical Interpretation: Rhetoricizing the Foundations; R.J.Hurley Samuel Beckett's Use of the Bible and the Responsibility of the Reader; S.Athanasopoulou-Kypriou On Trial: Mikhail Bakhtin and Abram Tertz's Address to 'God'; L.Owens Bible and Ethics: Moral Formation and Analogical Imagination; J.Nissen Reading and the Literary The Playwright, the Novelist, and the Comedian: A Case Study in Audience Responsibility; D.Visser Dialogue in Gandhi's Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule or the Reader as Truth-Seeker; C.A.B.Joseph Responsibly Performing Vulnerability: Salman Rushdie's Fury and Edgar Laurence Doctorow's City of God; E.Borgman The "Indian" Character of Modern Hindi Drama: Neo-Sanskritic, Pro-Western Naturalistic, or Natavistic Dramas?; D.Dimitrova Apocryphal Imitation of the Feminine - Judith of Bethulia ; E.Philpot Revolting Fantasies: Reviewing the Cinematic Image as Fruitful Ground for Creative Theological Interpretations in the Company of Julia Kristeva; A.Jasper Literature as Resistance: Hannah Arendt on Storytelling; D.De Schutter

O autorze

GAYE WILLIAMS ORTIZ is Professor of Communication Studies, Augusta State University, USA.

CLARA A.B. JOSEPH is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Canada.