Tag: Reading

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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)?

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What I Learned From…Reading Infinite Jest

Last semester, I taught a Non-Fiction and Its Process course. Instead of filling the syllabus with a smorgasbord of authors, I assigned the one book of non-fiction I knew well: David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Much to my surprise, the students dug it.

In fact, they dug it so much that a group of them were at least interested in reading Infinite Jest, DFW’s mammoth novel that clocks in at just over a thousand pages. I decided to strike while the iron was hot and wrote a schedule to get through the book over break, set up a Facebook page for an online reading group discussion, and started plugging away.

When the dust settled, six people started the book, two of us actually finished it, and I had learned some important lessons. Here are five of them…

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Representation: Part 2

As I work toward providing biblical presuppositions for the concept of representation, I read through WJT Mitchell’s really dense essay on the word from Critical Terms in Literary Study. What follows are nine observations about the essay (Mitchell’s main points) followed by three things I think are missing from this model.

  1. The study of literature begins with the “naive intuition” that literature represents life (i.e. mimesis). That’s why Mitchell’s essay is the first in the collection.
  2. Representation is not just aesthetic or semiotic. It’s political, particularly in this country.
  3. Representation always costs something, be it presence, immediacy, or truth.
  4. This same gap in presence, immediacy, and truth makes literature possible.
  5. We can never totally control representation. As soon as we start using it to communicate, it will also be a tool for miscommunication.
  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).
  7. The structure of representation includes the representation OF something BY something TO someone.
  8. You can classify representation according to the icon, index, and symbol triumvirate. Icons represent by resemblance, indexes represent by causation, and symbols represent arbitrarily. Writing is the third of these.
  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.

Here’s what I think Mitchell is missing.

  1. Christ is the representation of the Father. Representation is inscribed into the ontology of the trinity.
  2. Humans are made in the image of God. We are not just defined by the fact that we use representation. Rather, we are representations.
  3. Adam and then Christ represented all humanity. That is, representation is a fundamental part of God’s redemptive narrative.

We must take this into account. Over the next two days, I will work out how these biblical concepts help us make sense of literature.

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Poetry and God

“When St. Philip asked our Lord to ‘show us the Father’ (John 14:8), he was an example of what St. Anselm called ‘faith seeking understanding.’”

From Father George Rutler

Today, we start looking at poetry in my Intro to Lit course. I typically have students survey five or six poems about God and love respectively as they start to get a feel for how to read a poem.

Fresh off of a class about interpretation and paradigms, the poems we look at today concerning God should get some discussion started. Poetry intensifies our interpretations of and emotional reaction to the world. These poems are pitched high emotionally as they seek understanding about some aspect of God.

In “Batter My Heart,” John Donne feels trapped. The fact that he needs God means that he needs God to help him do what’s right. If he good choose God on his own, he wouldn’t need God in the first place. Donne is intensifying language from the Old and New testaments, from the laments of the Psalms and some of Paul’s most despairing cries in Romans.

In “Love (iii)” George Herbert offers an allegory for the gospel. Christ offers the speaker a chance to eat with him. While the speaker finds himself unworthy to either be a guest, the Lord offers grace and love in the form of food and fellowship.

In “The Lamb” and “The Tyger,” William Blake reflects on how different creatures reflect their creator. If God is like the lamb, then we see Jesus. If God is like the tiger, then he is terrifying.

In “Battle Hymn of the Republic” Julia Ward Howe gives us a God who actively participates in human affairs and, with war-like proficiency, advances His cause on the earth.

Finally, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty” tries to not only represent but give us the experience of witnessing God’s beauty in nature.

I’m excited to see if one of these poems resonates with my students more than others. We’ll spend time on Donne and Blake, but I will call for them to re-examine Herbert and Hopkins in light of our discussion.

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Critical Thinking Applied: Part 3

Discriminating between observation and inference, between
established fact and subsequent conjecture.

From What the Best College Teachers Do

As I work through this checklist of critical thinking skills from Ken Bain’s book, I’m struck by how literature courses, through their focus on interpretation, can get at the thorny distinction between observation and inference.

For my quizzes this semester, I’ve been giving metaphors to identify and unpack. Yesterday, my metaphor came from the Sherlock Holmes short story: “A Scandal in Bohemia.”

“He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen…”

This is Watson describing his detective friend. Students wanted to make “machine” into “computer” or some kind of processing device, an interpretation of the metaphor that would clash with its 1891 publication date.

So we have two facts: the story came out in 1891 and Watson has called Holmes a machine.

The next part is inference: what does the word “machine” refer to?

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Unpacking The Student’s Prayer

Every semester, I start each class by having my students say aloud the following prayer:

O Creator of all things, true source of light and wisdom, origin of all being, graciously let a ray of your light penetrate the darkness of our understanding. Take from us the double darkness in which we have been born, an obscurity of sin and ignorance. Give us a keen understanding, a retentive memory, and the ability to grasp things correctly and fundamentally. Grant us the talent of being exact in our explanations and the ability to express ourselves with thoroughness and charm. Point out the beginning, direct the progress, and help in the completion. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Every semester I find new truth in it. This is what I’ve been telling students about the prayer yesterday and today as the spring semester begins…

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Critical Thinking Applied: Part 2

Being clearly and explicitly aware of gaps in available information. Recognizing when a conclusion is reached or a decision made in absence of complete information and being able to tolerate the ambiguity and uncertainty. Recognizing when one is taking something on faith without having examined the “How do we know . . . ? Why do we believe . . . ?” questions.

From What the Best College Teachers Do

Students tend to assume that the interpretation of literature is subjective: this is what it means to me and you either can’t explain that or there’s no way of disproving it.

Encouraging my students to see what we can and cannot defend in the service of our argument will be an important part of the class.

It’s one of the reasons that I will be focusing on figurative language in daily quiz questions. Metaphors and similes ask to be unpacked, and if students can begin to discern the meanings of this non-literal use of language, they’ll be on their way to saying substantive (and not merely subjective) about what they’ve read.

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Critical Thinking Applied: Part 1

Consciously raising the questions “What do we know . . . ? How do we know…? Why do we accept or believe . . . ? What is the evidence for . . . ?” when studying some body of material or approaching a problem.

From What the Best College Teachers Do

In his chapter on what the best college teachers expect from their students, Ken Bain gives a list of ten things the best professors use to assess critical thinking.

In my introduction to literature courses this week, I will be asking them why we turn to fiction to help us understand the truth. Part of my case to them will be the fact that Christ’s parables were certainly not standard features of Judaic rabbi training. Christ made a point of telling stories that were not literally true in order to convey deeper truths about the coming kingdom of God. If we figure out why, then we will be on our way to establishing why the work we do in the literature course is important.

I might fill in the ellipses in Bain’s questions this way:

What do we know about fiction?

How do we know that fiction isn’t simply lying?

Why do we accept or believe fictional stories as a valid means of communicating truth?

What is the evidence for using fictional stories this way from scripture?

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Giving an A

This ‘A’ is not an expectation to live up to but a possibility to live into.

From The Art of Possibility

In their book The Art of Possibility, Rosamund and Benjamin Zander discuss the freeing practice of giving yourself and others an ‘A’ inside and outside the classroom.

Ben Zander gives students enrolled in his year-long musical performance course the promise that they will get an ‘A’ if they complete the following assignment: within the first two weeks of the class, they must write a letter dated at the end of the academic year that begins, “Dear Mr. Zander, I got my ‘A’ because…”

I will be giving this prompt to my students for their first weekly letter because I’m interested to see what kind of work they think writing-intensive literature courses demand. More than that, I want them to exercise their imagination. What will they have done to live into the possibility of getting a superior mark in the class?

I will share them with my own letter. This is its first sentence: “Dear students of ENGL 101, I got my ‘A’ because I coached you through the process of reading and writing about literature in a way that made you more confident as a reader of and writer about literature while convincing you that both practices are of practical and spiritual importance.”

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Mother Night as Meta-fiction

Scrutinizing meaning systems more closely will help us to distinguish the good from the bad in the systems we develop as we seek to live in God’s world in a manner pleasing to him.

From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith

In the quotation above, Susan Gallagher and Roger Lundin make a case for the benefits of reading meta-fiction, a newer genre that seems in its very philosophical premises to oppose Christianity.

The work work I teach that most explores the epistemological skepticism undergirding meta-fiction is Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. The novel purports to be the diary of an American Nazi name Howard Campbell who is writing from an Israeli jail cell pending a trial for war crimes. Vonnegut, the novel’s author, claims only to be the book’s editor. Campbell is himself a writer, a playwright more specifically, and Vonnegut-as-editor meditates on what that means for the diary’s veracity.

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