Tag: Reading

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Rhetorical vs. Dialectical Books

In the opening chapter of his Self-Consuming Artifacts, Stanley Fish distinguishes between rhetoric and dialectic.

While rhetoric “satisfies” readers that “mirror[s] and present[s] for approval the opinions its readers already hold”, dialectic is unsettling for it “requires of its readers a searching and rigorous scrutiny of everything they believe in and live by.” Fish adds that a dialectical work does not simply proclaim the truth “but asks that its readers discover the truth for themselves.”

This made me wonder what the dialectical books in my own reading history had been, works that had challenged the assumptions of my worldview and had motivated me to seek truth in a new way. I came up with short list that follows (note: I’m omitting the Bible, the book of books that stands as the primary lens through which I view the world).

They include:

  1. Cornelius Van Til’s apologetical work, particularly as excerpted and commented on in Greg Bahnsen’s Van Til’s Apologetic
  2. James K. A. Smith’s view of educational formation in Desiring the Kingdom
  3. Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of traditional morality in The Genealogy of Morals
  4. Northrop Frye’s approach to literary criticism (it can be pursued with science rigor) and literary evaluation (it’s worthless) in Anatomy of Criticism
  5. James Baldwin’s scathing look at the complicity of the Christian church in America’s troubled history with race in The Fire Next Time
  6. C.S. Lewis’s representation of academic moral cowardice in That Hideous Strength
  7. David Foster Wallace’s examination of addiction and depression in Infinite Jest

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Orthodoxy and Orthopraxy

I have learned that teaching doctrine and teaching obedience are two very different things.

From Contagious Disciple Making

I read Paul and David Watson’s amazing book Contagious Disciple Making this week and left with this insight into teaching: I can say all the right things as a teacher, but if I don’t do them myself my students will not listen.

The doctrines in English lit are clarity and concision, a commitment to revision, and a desire to interpret the world in a way consistent with your faith.

This is so much easier to say than do.

God, help me to do all of this: not just in my reading and my reading but in my personal interactions with each of my students.

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Get Personal

[S]tories can bring things to your attention in such a way that you might begin to think differently about something and then go on to act on these new thoughts in a very concrete way. Reading texts enables us to participate in life, not to escape it…

From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith

I brought this quotation from Gallagher and Lundin into class to urge my students to think through something important to them as they wrote their first papers about Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories. My example of how they might do this, however, was not personal. It came from a place of judgment. Many of them were writing about the sexual infidelity in Lahiri’s story “Sexy,” and I urged them to think about how that story might cause them to examine their own romantic commitments.

While this was not entirely unfounded, it missed the larger point. It was pedantic. It was tone-deaf. Most of all, it didn’t model for them the type of introspection I pray that they would have.

The irony is that I had a personal example sitting right in front of me.

For this first unit, I’ve revised a paper on Lahiri’s story “This Blessed House,” which concerns a newly married couple. As I’ve read and written about the story, I’ve realized it’s really about the part of us that wishes our significant other were just like us. The story’s protagonist Sanjeev cannot see the world from his wife’s point of view. It’s only at the end of the story that he realizes what she brings to his life, that it’s actually a good thing that she’s not a copy of him because he’s able to be strong where she’s weak and she’s able to be strong where he’s weak.

My worst times as a husband have been where I wished that Britt would simply be like me. When I’m loving her well, I’m letting her be who God made her and rejoicing in that. It’s a good thing she’s not like me! I have strengths, and so does she. Writing about Lahiri’s story is a great reminder of that.

This is what Gallagher and Lundin are gesturing towards. Literature does not take us out of life. It puts us in contact with life if we’re willing to be vulnerable enough to look in the mirror. I pray that I will keep looking and modeling for my students what that looking entails.

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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?