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Hrothgar and David

In the middle of Beowulf, the Danish king Hrothgar warns the titular hero about pride.

0 flower of warriors, beware of that trap.
Choose, dear Beowulf, the better part,
eternal rewards. Do not give way to pride.
For a brief while your strength is in bloom
but it fades quickly; and soon there will follow
illness or the sword to lay you low,
or a sudden fire or surge of water
or jabbing blade or javelin from the air
or repellent age. Your piercing eye
will dim and darken; and death will arrive,
dear warrior, to sweep you away.

From Beowulf

The next time I teach this poem, I will pair this passage with these verses from Psalm 90…

Continue reading “Hrothgar and David”
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Truth and Conflict

We are called to the difficult task of discerning the truth, but at the same time we are reminded that we are, in a very real sense, only children at play in God’s kingdom. We laugh and dispute and long to know the truth. And though our experience is often one of conflict, including the conflict of interpretations, as Christians we also have a genuine hope…

From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith

In the quotation above, Gallagher and Lundin get at a crucial problem my students have with English courses: sometimes it feels like there’s more than one right answer.

Or, to state it more radically, sometimes it feels like there’s no answer because everyone is entitled to their own answer.

Christians believe that just because we can’t have God’s total knowledge of something doesn’t mean our partial knowledge is false. In fact, we don’t need to worry about inevitable gaps in our knowledge or the conflicts that come with our pursuit, if indeed we are searching after Truth.

My students handed in their outlines for their first papers this past weekend, and none of them had exactly the same argument. I told them this was a good thing. Either their papers could complement one another so that they get closer to the truth together then they would separately, or in their very conflict they would clarify key issues that would help us pinpoint the key question or truth in the story under debate.

I’m excited to learn more about the stories these students are writing about, but I’m even more excited about seeing my students actively pursue truth through the writing their doing.

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Structure: Part 3

I’ve been working this week on a view of structure that takes into account Christian presuppositions. You can find my earlier posts here and here...

In what follows I respond to the nine points made by John Carlos Rowe on the topic for the Critical Terms in Literary Study volume. I put his points in italics and mine in bold. The point is to sketch out ways in which the Christian description and deployment of the term “structure” would overlap and differ from the non-Christian description and deployment of same.

Continue reading “Structure: Part 3”
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What I’ve Learned From…My Reading This Week

Here are five insights from the various books I’ve been dipping into this week…

  1. John Calvin saw God’s three most important qualities as: lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness. From Institutes of the Christian Religion
  2. Ministers frequently fall back on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a way to determine how to serve their communities. From the article “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Is Not a Ministry Guide”
  3. Metanoia is a critical term not just for theological thought (i.e. it’s the word most often translated as “repentance”) but also for rhetoric. From The Rhetoric of Personal Transformation
  4. There’s a key distinction between ambiguity and vagueness. Ambiguity applies to a word that has more than one meaning. Vagueness refers to words where the meaning is unclear. From With Good Reason
  5. Beauty and grace are complimentary: a handshake between the aesthetic and divine. Beauty is meaningful complexity, and grace is the gift that makes our seeing that complexity possible. From What Are We Doing Here?
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Why We Read

Our responsibilities to God, to the cultivation and enhancement of his creation, and to the love and care of human beings give focus to our lives. Our reading of literature is part of the way we fulfill these responsibilities and carry out our unique vocation.

From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith

This quotation from Gallagher and Lundin sums up our responsibility to delight in and glorify God through reading.

  1. We are charged with doing everything to the glory of God (I Cor. 10:31). This includes reading as much as it does eating and drinking.
  2. We are called to participate in Christ’s progressive redemption of the world. Literature allows us, on the one hand, to see how that world is broken and needs redemption and, on the other, to imagine what that redemption might look like.
  3. We are called to love God and our neighbor. When Jesus wanted to demonstrate that truth, he told a story: the parable of the Good Samaritan. The vehicle for that truth is as powerful as the content.
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Doing the Reading

We’re at the point in the semester (week 4) where we’ve finally had the “oh, so nobody read” class.

In a pleasure/pain model of motivation, it’s easy to appeal to pain:

  1. You’ll flunk your quizzes.
  2. You’ll flunk your essay (which is based on a story you’re supposed to have read).
  3. You’ll flunk the class.

But that’s coming from the outside, and I know that part of what they’re implicitly asking is, “Of what practical value is doing the reading?” The absolute worst thing I could do is to try and make a practical case and get locked in a war of pragmatic attrition.

The first week of class, I had them write me a letter that was dated May 10th and began, “Dear Dr. Sircy, I got my ‘A’ because…”

Here were some of the things they wrote…

I made sure to keep up with assignments and the required reading as this course went on in order to receive an A at the end of the semester.  

While this class has given me difficulty in the past, I really worked on dedicating the time and energy to the course that it deserves. I put the appropriate amount of work into writing my papers, reading the texts, and completing assignments.

I got an A in your class because I read all the books and material you assigned us. 

I got my ‘A’ because I put in the work and I cared enough to get the grade I wanted.

I got my ‘A’ because I committed to completing all my assignments and homework on time to the best of my ability. 

I strategically began dividing up the reading and other assignments for the week among each day so I would not have to do it all in one day and feel rushed.

Today, I’ll be reading some of these letters in class. Yes, this will be painful for some of them, but the letters they wrote were premised on pleasure: on what they were willing to do in order to get the grade they wanted. If they’re internally motivated to do better work, that’s worth more than all the pragmatic appeals I could ever hope to make.

I’ll end with I Corinthians 10:31.

So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.

We’re not just doing this work for ourselves. We’re doing it for God.

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Structure: Part 2

As I work toward providing biblical presuppositions for the term “structure,” I read through John Carlos Rowe’s really dense essay on the word from Critical Terms in Literary Study. What follows are nine observations about the essay (Rowe’s main points) with three observations about where Christianity might intervene.

  1. In its etymology, the word “structure” involves building or scattering elements in both space and time, and the relationship between these two things (primarily with time subordinated to space) has subsequently been important in the work structuralism has done.
  2. Structure is a self-conscious replacement for the word “form,” which has connotations of transcendence and the privileging of the human mind before anything else (including language).
  3. The key structuralist of the 20th Century is Ferdinand de Saussure, whose work in linguistics established the basic coordinates for other structuralist work. His primary insights are that the relationship between signifiers and signifieds in linguistic signs are arbitrary (i.e. not natural) and that language pre-exists human thought.
  4. The most significant scholarly contributions structuralists have made is to linguistics and anthropology. The “structures” they have created are less the fictional models (i.e. not natural or empirical) they use to look at the world than the observations those structures enabled through scientific-esque rigor and research.
  5. Structure has subsequently been used in a series of technological disciplines such as cybernetics, psycho-biology, systems analysis, and information theory. The way we understand the human mind is largely a product of structuralist assumptions.
  6. Structure is less about establishing the meaning of any given part of a cultural practice than about establishing the relationship among a cultural practice’s parts. It is descriptive rather than prescriptive.
  7. In this way, structure is a good index for the shift from a material to a post-modern economy where goods are valued less for their natural use than how they can be exchanged.
  8. Anglo-American critics tended to apply the term to literature more frequently, but with a different meaning than European scholarship. The New Critics saw a piece of literature as a structure but one that was trans-historical. Northrop Frye exploded this theory with his own myth criticism that essentially offered a multi-disciplinary science of man by insisting that every social science tapped into the same linguistic symbols that were present in literature. Roland Barthes is the European critic most identified with literary structuralism. Despite their differences, these critics share the assumption that structural analysis, of whatever variety, will help cultivate human freedom.
  9. Structuralism has been criticized for its inability to explain historical change (following Saussure, structuralists have done more SYNCHRONIC than DIACHRONIC work) and for its penchant for generalizing the fictional or arbitrary models it uses to make its investigations.

Here are some possible points of contact…

  1. The Christian, too, believes that language precedes the human mind via the Logos that created the world. The Bible gives us a God creating the world through language.
  2. The structuralists historicize the arbitrary models they create to understand the world, but there is a hint of Genesis’s dominion mandate in the near necessity such critics insist humans have to impose structure on an alien reality.
  3. Structure cannot account for grace.
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Structure: Part 1

According to a second philosophical view, the coherence theory, there is a kind of truth that pertains less to physical realities or events than to a set of propositions within which a claim may be regarded as true if found to be logically consistent—or coherent—with the rest of the data set.

From Christianity and Literature: Philosophical Foundations and Critical Practice

Early in their volume, David Lyle Jeffrey and Gregory Maillett provide three models of truth that the Christian literary critic must understand and be ready to encounter. The coherence theory is the second of these.

It is the one that most closely aligns with the critical term “structure” and the critical school “structuralism” that I’ll be investigating this week.

The essay on “structure” from Critical Terms for Literary Study concludes with this claim:

“Structure” is one of the key terms of our postmodernity because it openly acknowledges its claim for scientific rigor as well as its fabricated character.

From John Carlos Rowe’s essay “Structure”

This is the tension of the coherence theory of truth in one pat definition. It demands rigor, a kind of internal logic (i.e. rational and scientific), while on the other hand admitting that it’s not true (i.e. that it does not correspond to objective reality).

Rowe’s essay is considerably denser than WJT Mitchell’s, so I’ll be ruminating on it more before sharing the central claims in Rowe’s definition. Suffice it to say that structuralism is premised on a Kantian inability to describe the transcendental realm. Structuralism in its many forms shows humans making the world over in their image in an attempt to understand a fundamentally alien reality. While some theorists–Roland Barthes and Northrop Frye, for example–see this process as liberal and humane, it is also disconnected from truth and the divine.

The chief question is, then, where should the structure of thought come from? What should they be?

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Representation: Part 3

I’ve been working this week on a view of representation that takes into account Christian presuppositions. You can find my earlier posts here and here.

In what follows I respond to the nine points made by WJT Mitchell in his essay on the topic for the Critical Terms in Literary Study volume. I put his points in italics and mine in bold. The point is to sketch out ways in which the Christian description and deployment of the term “representation” would overlap and differ from the non-Christian description and deployment of same.

  1. The study of literature begins with the “naive intuition” that literature represents life (i.e. mimesis) and that humans are symbol making creatures. At the heart of God is the Son’s perfect representation of the Father (Heb. 1:3). At the heart of creation is the Logos creating the universe and calling it good (Gen. 1) which implies that creation is a perfect creative representation of what God intended to make. Moreover, both men and women are made in God’s image (Gen. 1:26). So the study of literature begins by acknowledging that humans are not just symbol-making creatures. They are symbol-made creatures who reflect a symbol-making God.
  2. Representation is not just aesthetic or semiotic. It’s political, particularly in this country. Representation is not just aesthetic or political; it is spiritual. Or rather, because it is spiritual, it is necessarily aesthetic and political. Representation is at the heart of the godhead. It manifests itself in our being as creatures made in God’s image. We live in a world sustained by God’s eternal Word. Any field of study that asks us to consider representation gets us closer to understanding metaphysical truth.
  3. Representation always costs something, be it presence, immediacy, or truth. While this claim may be true ethically (i.e. the right or wrong uses of human representation) it is not true metaphysically. For the reasons listed above, I don’t think a Christian cannot agree that representation has a necessary cost. Our image-bearing nature is premised on distance. Creation reflects God’s power and glory. He called it good although it was different than him. Christ was not suddenly sinful because he became a person. We were only able to see the Father truly because of that representation. After the fall humans can and do use God-given tools (e.g. logic, language) for ethically malicious ends, but that is different than saying that there is a cost always built into representation. In fact, it is because of representation that redemption is possible (Rom. 5:12-15).
  4. This same gap in presence, immediacy, and truth makes literature possible. It’s telling that the perfect representation of God, Christ, is the Bible character who uses the most blatantly literary form: the parable.
  5. We can never totally control representation. As soon as we start using it to communicate, it will also be a tool for miscommunication. This is ethically true before redemption, but God’s word will always accomplish what it was intended to accomplish (Isaiah 55:11) which means that even in an ethically fallen world, the metaphysics of representation are not tainted.
  6. Representation has always had its skeptics, from the philosophical (e.g. Plato) to the religious (e.g. any religion that prohibits idols) to the aesthetic (e.g. modernism and its rejection of representational art). The God of Christianity is both transcendent and immanent. The law forbids graven idols or images (Exodus 20:4) but establishes symbols and types that will represent the divine. God wants to communicate with humanity. He does so through creation, his revealed word, and ultimately Christ. Christianity is wary about representation primarily because of how crucial it is to the nature of God, creation, and humanity.
  7. The structure of representation includes the representation OF something BY something TO someone. My problem with this model is that it means that the audience (the one who receives the representation) is the only necessary agent in the process. It leaves the agent representing TO someone blank, as though all we can talk about is a person who imputes meaning after the fact. If the Christian story is true, then meaning and representation are ethical and personal because they both begin with God. Creation itself represents God’s glory (Psalm 19:1, Romans 1:20), and the Psalmist and Paul tell us we should be able to discern from creation the existence of the one who created the world. (Note: my thinking here is not as clean and precise as it should be.)
  8. You can classify representation according to the icon, index, and symbol triumvirate. Icons represent by resemblance, indexes represent by causation, and symbols represent via arbitrary signs. Writing is the third of these. This taxonomy gives us a way of thinking about the differences among Christ (God’s icon), people (God’s index), and the Bible (God’s symbolic revelation). One note: just because symbolism can be arbitrary doesn’t mean it has to be, however.
  9. Our theory of representation plays a key role in how we interpret the identity of a work of art, that art’s meaning, the integrity of the author, and the validity of any interpretation of that art. Truth. That’s why it matters if Christian presuppositions clash with those of scholars like Mitchell.
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Representation: Part 1

The core of Christian theological aesthetics is the religious experience of reestablished communion with God, mediated in this case by aesthetic structures which create, facilitate or sometimes even require a triune meeting between the work of literary art, the spiritually awakened human person, and the divine life of God revealed by faith and reason.

From Christianity and Literature: Philosophical Foundations and Critical Practice

In their book on Christianity and literature, David Lyle Jeffrey and Gregory Maillet argue that Christians experience the communion above through literature when they apprehend the true, good, and beautiful in what they read.

At the core of this experience is mimesis, literature’s imitation or representation of human life.

Jeffrey and Maillet spend an entire chapter arguing for a correspondence view of truth over and against coherence and pragmatic views. The correspondence view holds that a verbal statement is true insofar as it corresponds with external reality. The way that literature’s “fiction” can claim truth is through aesthetics, its participation in the expression of the beautiful.

Beauty is an important theological concept, one that is not ultimately subjective but, as they argue, “is intrinsically linked, inseparably interdependent, with the intellectual truth and moral beauty existent within the life and presence of the Christian God.”

All this is crucial to explaining to my students what literature is and how it fits into God’s work in the world.

My next two questions are this: what are the biblical presuppositions undergirding literature’s use of representation (conceptual), and what are some concrete ways I could teach these abstract ideas (pedagogical)?