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It is now a common assumption in the art-historical world that much of early Christian art (particularly from the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries)
It is now a common assumption in the art-historical world that much of early Christian art (particularly from the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries) portrays the Roman Emperor as some sort of demigod and intercessor between our world and that of the divine, imbued with ultimate power. This is what the author called "Emperor Mystique." In fact, this idea might even shore up the even more commonly held belief that the Church and the state were united for much of the middle ages. In "The Clash of Gods," Mathews critically examines this assumption and comes to what I thought were some fascinating conclusions. According to Mathews, it is largely the work of three scholars that is responsible for the rise of the Emperor Mystique: art historian Andre Grabar, medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz, and archaeologist Andreas Alfoldi. Along with collectively contributing to the Emperor Mystique, they come from Czarist Russia, Wilhelmine Germany, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire respectively, and all harbored a great love for imperial greatness and yearned, in some way, for its return. In order to do this, they all retroactively read signs of vanished empire into the early Christian art they were studying. As Mathews says, "The need to interpret Christ as an Emperor tells us more about the historians involve d than it does about Early Christian art" (16). The scholarly apparatus that Mathews brings to bear on his argument is impressive. The vast majority of the book looks at individual pieces of art, arguing for an interpretation against that of the Emperor Mystique, none of which I will recapitulate here. It could even be convincing, but I will confess to not knowing enough about the art of the period in question to say one way or another. One thing that I can say is that Mathew's argument seems to exhort the reader into an either/or reaction toward the three aforementioned scholars. As Peter Brown, the Princeton professor of the post-Constantinian Christian world, said in a review of the same book, Mathews thinks that "either representations of Christ betray artistic conventions that must mirror faithfully the visual content of contemporary court ceremonials and imperial representations - and, further, must communicate the overbearing message associated with such ceremonials and representations - or they communicate, often, the exact opposite." Another tacit assumption of the book that Mathews does nothing to repudiate is that the thesis would, in some ways, suggest that we dismiss not only the Emperor Mystique, but also the entire body of scholarship of Kantorowicz, Grabar, and Alfoldi. Grabar and Alfoldi might not be as read today, but Kantorowicz's "The King's Two Bodies" is still considered an indispensable text in historical medieval theology. I certainly do not want to suggest that the book is a hatchet job. It is not. I think Mathews achieves something lastingly important by giving us a book-length treatment that resists what is still, in some quarters, a widely held assumption. I would just regret to see this book read as something more than an unfortunate interpretive misreading that was made by a group of otherwise superb, astoundingly learned scholars. ...more |
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| 0674179579
| 9780674179578
| 0674179579
| 3.68
| 57
| May 15, 1999
| May 15, 1999
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really liked it
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As Kuper states, “The core of this book is … an evaluation of what has been the central project in postwar American cultural anthropology” (x). More e
As Kuper states, “The core of this book is … an evaluation of what has been the central project in postwar American cultural anthropology” (x). More explicitly, in the first part of the book, he details the French and German ideals of culture that grew out of the Enlightenment. “Part Two: Experiments” looks at how Clifford Geertz, David Schneider, and Marshall Sahlins respectively have constructed anthropologies of culture in response to various intellectual influences. As he explains in the moving introduction, he lived through South Africa during the Apartheid when the very concept of culture was used to legitimize the most inhumane kinds of violence and racism imaginable. Because of this, Kuper is very much a skeptic when it comes to any kind of belief that use of the word “culture” communicates any objective, essential quality about people or the way they live their lives. As I hinted at above, the argument starts in Europe, and migrates across the Atlantic Ocean. Kuper suggests that German intellectuals (Mannheim, Jaspers, and Mann more recently, but the concept dates back to Herder) believed in Kultur or Bildung – a kind of “cultured state by way of a process of education and spiritual development” which is “bounded in time and space and is coterminous with a national identity” (30). The French version of culture, with its haughty, transnational cosmopolitanism and materialism was perceived to be a direct threat to local distinctive cultures. Kuper then goes on to detail Talcott Parson’s conception of culture as a tripartite endeavor between the psychologist, anthropologist, and sociologist, each of whom would understand culture as a semiological system of how we use symbols. He calls Geertz a Parsonian, and takes him to task for analyzing signs and symbols outside of social structure. He gives a detailed account of Geertz’s hermeneutical account of the Balinese cockfight in his book “The Interpretation of Cultures,” suggesting that Geertz’s lack of sociological concern in his anthropology leaves only an idealist approach to interpretation which is radically separated from social conditions. David Schneider, the second anthropologist Kuper takes up, is known for his study of kinship relations. However, he completely divorced this pursuit from anything like an idea of “relationship” or “blood lines.” It should be noted that this is a fairly extreme version of relativism that not even many anthropologists adopt, and Kuper goes to lengths to point this out. Schneider makes the somewhat peculiar statement that “since it is perfectly possible to formulate … the cultural construct of ghosts without actually visually inspecting even a single specimen, this should be true across the board and without reference to the observability or non-observability of objects that may be presumed to be the referents of the cultural referents” (133). For Schneider, culture is wholly symbolic and arbitrary. The best part of the chapter on Marshall Sahlins is Kuper’s retelling of Sahlins’ debate with Gananath Obeyesekere, the Princeton professor of anthropology. At the heart of the debate was the nature of rationality of “native peoples” (the debate specifically focused around Captain Cook and the Hawaiian Islands). Obeyesekere maintained that anything short of admitting that native people and Westerners think similarly is another way of saying that they are hopefully different, irrational, and uncivilized. Sahlins, however, holds that the rationality of native peoples is wholly and completely unknowable to those in the Occident. The closing chapters of the book are scathing rebukes of postmodernism, and especially its influence on the American anthropological tradition in the 1980s and 1990s, claiming that it has “a paralyzing effect on the discipline [of anthropology]” (223). The twentieth century has certainly given the reader plenty of reasons to look askance at the very notion of culture. However, I am not sure that I am ready to completely do away with it as a powerful explanatory tool, no matter how diaphanous it may occasionally seem. I would definitely recommend the book for anyone interested in trends in twentieth-century American anthropology, and especially their intellectual genealogies. Whatever conclusions you have drawn about culture and what it means, I can guarantee you that this book will challenge them, and will do so thoughtfully. ...more |
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Sep 24, 2011
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| 184467343X
| 9781844673438
| 184467343X
| 4.01
| 1,134
| Oct 23, 2008
| Nov 02, 2009
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This book is a set of five essays in response to Ranciere’s earlier work “The Ignorant Schoolmaster.” All of these pieces are tied together by Rancier
This book is a set of five essays in response to Ranciere’s earlier work “The Ignorant Schoolmaster.” All of these pieces are tied together by Ranciere’s attempt to overcome the dyad so often associated with modernist aesthetics of passive spectator/active seer. The title essay extends the concept set forth in “The Ignorant Schoolmaster” by suggesting that the knowledge gap between the educated teacher and the student should be given up in place for an “equality of knowledge.” The goal of this is not to turn everyone into a scholar, however. As Ranciere says, “It is not the transmission of the artist’s knowledge or inspiration to the spectator. It is the third that is owned by no one, but which subsists between them, excluding any uniform transmission, any identity of cause and effect” (15). This is by far the most cogent and understandable of the essays in the collection, and it offers an interesting suggestion in rethinking the space between the actor and viewer, teacher and student, or any other relationship. However, it struck me as the kind of idea most at home in the world of theory, one that might not be well-translated into praxis. The second essay, “The Misadventures of Critical Thought,” Ranciere criticizes the traditional role of the spectator by claiming that it, even though a mode of criticism itself, it “reproduces its own logic.” He looks at photos from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Vietnam, by Martha Rosler and Josephine Meckseper. Some people do not want to view these graphic photographs, however that very refusal perpetuates and continues the logic of the war in the first place. Therefore, a critical stance toward the image needs to shift away from this approach toward the uncoupling of two logics, “the emancipating logic of capacity and the critical logic of collective inveiglement” (48). The last essay, “The Pensive Image,” sustains a further opening up between the formalist opposition of the active and passive. Ranciere argues for a shift – again, what he argues to be an emancipating shift – away from the “unifying logic of action” toward “a new status of the figure” (121). The end of pensiveness (of being, literally, “full of thought”) lies between narration and expression, one the mode of the active artist, the other of the passive spectator who fixes upon the artistic vision in order to impart to it a kind of reality. Like a lot of (post)modern Continental writing, Ranciere’s writing can be elliptical, and his arguments somewhat hard to follow, perhaps because they are difficult to sustain, however engaging. I chose this because it was short enough and seemed like a suitable introduction to his body of work. The essays were interesting and provocatively argued, but sometimes they seemed less than original: for example, the title essay really seems to add nothing to the old breaking apart of the bipolar opposition of active and passive in theatre, art, and political conscientiousness; it recapitulates it nicely, but imports nothing new to the conversation. Those looking for ways to re-imagine issues in contemporary aesthetics will find something new here (as well as penetrating discussions of the poetry of Mallarme and the films of Abbas Kiarostami), but it will unnecessarily frustrate the casual reader. ...more |
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Nov 09, 2011
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| 0061311227
| 9780061311222
| 0061311227
| 4.09
| 1,209
| Sep 1939
| Mar 25, 1964
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really liked it
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This book, perhaps the one for which Carr is best remembered, was written immediately before the start of World War II, and is considered one of the s
This book, perhaps the one for which Carr is best remembered, was written immediately before the start of World War II, and is considered one of the seminal texts of international relations. In fact, the preface to the first edition is dated September 30, 1939, a mere four weeks after the Wehrmacht invaded Poland. This is by no means incidental to the content, either. “Twenty Years’ Crisis” is a thoroughgoing critique of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century international politics and especially the assumptions on which they rest. It can be broken up into roughly two sections; the first is more theoretical in approach, while the second part analyzes certain instances of political structures, treaties, and international relations that support his theoretical assertions. I’m much more interested in the theory, so my focus in this review will be the first half, where Carr explores utopianism, realism, and their intellectual genealogies. After the end of the Great War, a popular idea in diplomatic circles was that only irrationality and aggression could possibly start another war, and only the construction of a set of international institutions, like the League of Nations, could prevent a similar breakout. That certainly is a pleasing thought, considering how much carnage and loss of life there was. This hope, which Carr identifies as a naïve and empty sentiment, is perhaps the most conspicuous symptom of what he calls “utopianism.” Utopians “pay little attention to existing ‘facts’ or to the analysis of cause and effect, but will devote themselves wholeheartedly to the elaboration of visionary projects for the attainment of the ends they have in view – projects whose simplicity and perfection gives them an easy and universal appeal” (5). Carr associates utopianism with the more intellectual strains in international relations, imputing the label to those with “the inclination to ignore what was and what is in contemplation of what should be.” Utopians put their moral ideals before political observation and empiricism. He traces utopianism to the willed, persistent belief in “the harmony of interests” – the common assumption that the pursuit of individual self-interest will necessarily dovetail with the interests of the nation as a whole. This idea is similar to the social Darwinism which also populated much nineteenth-century European social thought. Realism can in many ways be thought of as the antithesis of utopianism. Realists let observation, national interests, and power inform their view of international policy. Realists have “the inclination to deduce what should be from what was and what is.” Whereas utopians let morality inform their politics, realists let their politics inform their morality. Because of the rationalist, Weberian strains Carr associates with realism, he associated realism with the bureaucrat instead of the intellectual. While this book is often listed as the first defense of realism, Carr is extraordinarily fair-minded, and openly admits that there are problems with this approach, too. Importantly, realism fails to provide the idealism that any international policy must have. As Carr says, “Most of all, consistent realism breaks down because it fails to provide any ground for purposive or meaningful action. If the sequence of cause and effect is sufficiently rigid to permit of the ‘scientific prediction’ of events, if our thought is irrevocably conditioned by status and our interests, then both action and thought become devoid of purpose” (92). Because of the respective strengths and weaknesses of utopianism and realism, Carr concludes the theoretical portion of the book by suggesting that any meaningful, pragmatic political approach must rest somewhere near the middle of the realist/utopian continuum. “We return therefore to the conclusion that any sound political thought must be based on elements of both utopia and reality. Where utopianism has become a hollow and intolerable sham which serves merely as a disguise for the interests of the privileged, the realist performs an indispensable service in unmasking it. But pure realism can offer nothing but a naked struggle for power which makes any kind of international society impossible” (93). In the second part of the book, Carr asserts that utopians were so concerned with preventing another Great War, they began to completely ignore the element of power in international relations. For example, utopians assumed that all nations had the same interests in maintaining peace, and for the same reasons. A simple look at the actual milieu of European politics leading up to both World Wars I and II will suggest something different. He also spends a good deal of time pointing out how the three kinds of power that operate in international politics – economic, military, and public opinion – can’t be analyzed separately and have to be considered interdependently. Also, because (at least at that time) the international community has not agreed upon a means of resolving international disputes, treaties are barely worth the paper they’re printed on since countries can opt out on trivial conditions. It would have been interesting to see how the formation of the United Nations and the International Court of Justice would have changed Carr’s option on this point, if at all. For being over seventy years old, Carr’s analysis is still fresh, fascinating, and convincing. The only part that dates the book is the second half that looks at actual international events, since nothing after 1939 is covered. I did have to read up a little on the some of the treaties that are now lesser-known, like the Treaty of Locarno and the Franco-Soviet Treaty, but Carr very much rewards the reader’s effort in this respect. I would recommend this to anyone with an interest in the history of international relations, or anyone who wants a full-throated defense of realism and its place in the field. ...more |
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| 0300142080
| 9780300142082
| 0300142080
| 3.79
| 62
| Nov 10, 2009
| Nov 10, 2009
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really liked it
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Many religious people choose to focus on those things that make their religion unique, ahistorically separating it from the cultures and other religio
Many religious people choose to focus on those things that make their religion unique, ahistorically separating it from the cultures and other religions in and around which it originally formed. It makes sense that several kinds of contemporary Christianity would do the same. For those looking for a scholarly, well-argued position against the singular historical uniqueness of Christianity, Luke Timothy Johnson provides an excellent one in “Among the Gentiles.” Johnson feels that illustrating lines of continuity between Greco-Roman paganism, Jewish traditions, and nascent Christianity opens up the possibility of dialogue, as well as providing a space where the comparative history of religions can take place stripped of the limiting, often judgmental assumptions of contemporary conservative Christian apologetics. Any project with this type of scope requires tools which allow for the analysis of those types of continuity at which Johnson is looking. Methodologically, he proposes a fourfold religious typology which claims will be useful in looking at all of these traditions; even though Johnson teaches in a school of theology, he avoids any theological language in any of these. What he calls “Religiousness A” is the participation in divine benefits, including “revelation through prophecy, healing through revelation, providing security and status through Mysteries, enabling and providing for the daily successes of individuals, households, cities, and empires.” This type of religious practice is optimistic in believing that the world is a stage for divine activity, and pragmatic in that “salvation involves security and success in this mortal life.” Johnson says that Greek orator Aelius Aristides embodies this type. In several of Aristides’ orations, he singles out for praise Serapis (who protected him on his journey to Egypt) and Asclepius (who bestowed the gift of oratory upon him). Religiousness B is moral transformation, which exemplifies the belief that “the divine [spirit] is immanent within human activity and expressed through moral transformation.” The pagan example here is the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, whose Enchiridion is quite literally a “handbook for the moral life,” detailing how to manage desires and emotions and learn one’s social duties. Religiousness C attempts to transcend the world, since “the divine is not found in material processes of the world but only in the realm of immortal spirit and light. Salvation is rescuing the spark of light that has fallen into a bodily prison and returning it, through asceticism and death itself, to the realm from which it first came. It is triumph through escape.” Johnson selects as an example of Religiousness C the Poimandres, a selection from the Corpus Hermeticum (a complex set of texts of Egyptian origin associated with the revealer-god Hermes Trismegistus). Religiousness D tries to stabilize the world, consisting largely of “all ministers and mystagogues of cults, all prophets who translated oracles and examined entrails and Sibylline utterances, all therapists who aided the god Asclepius in his healing work, all ‘liturgists’ who organized and facilitated the festivals, all priests who carried out sacrifices, all Vestal Virgins whose presence and dedication ensured the permanence of the city.” Johnson chooses Plutarch, the biographer, priest, and philosopher as the epitome of Religiousness D. Plutarch accepts the responsibility of exercising civic magistracies, shows a commitment to maintaining Apollo’s temple at Delphi (as well as serving as a priest there), and expends a lot of effort in returning the temple to its former grandeur. Plutarch is a student of the social dimension of religion, and obviously is most concerned with how religion affects the reigning social order. Johnson says that types A and B were already at work in the Christian world in the first century; he looks at type A in the apocryphal Gospels, Acts, and Montanism; type B is discussed in Clement of Rome, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Polycarp. Religiousness C, “transcending the world,” Johnson argues, does not appear until the second century, where its predominant idiom is found in the Gnostic writings discovered at Nag-Hammadi, and especially Irenaeus’ refutation of Gnostic doctrine in “Adversus Haereses.” Religiousness D, stabilizing the world, first became recognizable after 313’s Edict of Milan, which marked the beginning of Constantine’s adoption of Christianity as the official imperial religion, and grew even stronger after the appearance of political and communal power within the bishoprics around the Christian world. If there was one criticism I have of the book, it would be that the fourfold typology is sometimes applied too strictly to situations where it doesn’t apply as well as others. It is clear from the way Johnson phrases the language of the four types that he anticipates the rise of Christianity, and therefore molds them to accommodate it. Also, Johnson represents the types as if they were compartmentalized and essential, when in fact they bleed together and inform each others’ practice. Surely transcendence was sometimes thought of as a gift bestowed by the gods, or that moral transformation can stabilize society, and so forth. Surely Johnson realizes this, but he has already performed quite the feat in establishing his thesis in a mere 280 pages. Johnson is a Catholic, and his scholarship in this book truly is in the spirit of the “Nostra Aetate,” the Second Vatican Council’s rallying exhortation for a thoroughgoing ecumenism. The truth is that Johnson does have an agenda: one of inclusion, one whose goal is the “embrace of a catholicity of religious sensibility and expression.” At the heart of Johnson’s book is a call for Christians to embrace the fullness and complexity of their past, and to view this as a means of starting a conversation instead of stopping one. I have simplified and adumbrated some of the arguments that Johnson makes in the book, because they really are too rich and fully textured to give them the treatment they deserve here. I recommend this highly for anyone with a catholic (lower-case c) attitude toward Christianity and Christian history, and anyone who wants to learn about the ways that Christianity borrowed from paganism during its first few centuries. ...more |
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| 0674345355
| 4.12
| 100
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| Dec 23, 2006
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really liked it
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“The Genesis of Secrecy” is a set of the collected and expanded Charles Eliot Norton lectures given at Harvard during 1977-1978. In this book, Kermod
“The Genesis of Secrecy” is a set of the collected and expanded Charles Eliot Norton lectures given at Harvard during 1977-1978. In this book, Kermode announces his task to be one of a secular interpreter (or anti-interpreter, as it were), completely unencumbered, yet still highly knowledgeable, of older Biblical-critical traditions and their concomitant dogma. Hermeneutics is the main concern here. The Gospel of Mark is the real center of gravity, but Kermode’s catholicity draws him also to James Joyce and Henry Green, with some non-canonical Gospels thrown in for good measure. In the first lecture, “Carnal and Spiritual Senses,” the act of interpretation is likened to an attempt to transition from being an “outsider” to an “insider,” that is, someone with special, institutionalized knowledge about the text at hand. Interpretation is necessarily an act that always frustrates itself if it aims to find a concrete, absolute nugget of meaning; instead, the multiplicity and indeterminacy of hermeneutic practice, and our proclivity for allegorical and elliptical readings, mean that any essentialism is textually impossible. In fact, Kermode all but says that what it means to be a narrative is to have “hermeneutic potential.” His carnal and spiritual are reconfigurations of Freud’s manifest and latent, but without all the Freudian baggage. With biblical texts, he sometimes opts for the similar “pleromatist” instead of latent. In another lecture titled “What are the Facts?,” he discusses the role of textual facticity in historical writing. This is especially controversial, considering that Kermode has chosen the Gospels as a main focus – texts whose historical facts are hard to square, to say the least. To add to the complexity of looking at the Gospels as historical documents, one must consider that the Passion narrative was foretold in the Old Testament, and therefore its authenticity was a prerequisite to the supposed authority of the Gospels. In short, Kermode makes the dubious claim that, as a textual outsider, it is well nigh impossible to discern historical writing from any other type. It is uncertain whether Kermode knew exactly how close he is to poststructuralism here. It is not the case that all narratives dissolve into an incoherent semiological play of signs and signifiers when under interpretive scrutiny. Kermode’s approach results in a kind of textual nihilism. Interpretation always involves the interplay of intentionality and historical perspective, but there is no reason why that interplay must necessarily annihilate our ability to discern between genres, or what those genres are trying to accomplish. Kermode also never discusses his controversial choice of texts he uses to reach his conclusions. What would have happened had he chosen Sallust or Polybius, whose accounts can be checked against other texts and archaeological evidence? The choice of the Gospel of Mark makes Kermode’s arguments no less fascinating or thought-provoking, but it does make arguing the point much easier. This is one of the best-known books of Kermode’s latter theory, and is indicative of a marked turn away from some of his earlier work, especially 1957’s “The Romantic Image,” which was a more traditional piece of criticism. In the earlier book, he accuses historians of applying some “false categories of modern thought,” rendering their work little more than “myth” or “allegory.” Many of Kermode’s attacks in “The Romantic Image” were driven by a call for a correspondence theory of truth between all kinds of texts – critical, historical, and literary. Unfortunately, “The Genesis of Secrecy” took a turn away from his earlier attempts at genre criticism, and toward what Kermode has elsewhere called “French utopianism.” This is a wonderful and interesting book, and one that everyone interested in modern criticism should be exposed to. I happen to disagree with its conclusions, but I found that it made me wrestle with some of the most fundamental assumptions I had about criticism as an act. Even considering the significant change in approach in the twenty years separating “The Romantic Image” and “Genesis of Secrecy,” Kermode never lost any of his scholarly cosmopolitanism and humane warmth, which is what draws me to read him again and again. ...more |
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Sep 24, 2011
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Sep 27, 2011
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| 0745639879
| 9780745639871
| 0745639879
| 3.87
| 1,565
| 2007
| Dec 26, 2006
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really liked it
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Zygmunt Bauman is a Polish-born sociologist in the Marxist tradition mostly known for his thoroughgoing critiques of consumerism, modernity, and cultu
Zygmunt Bauman is a Polish-born sociologist in the Marxist tradition mostly known for his thoroughgoing critiques of consumerism, modernity, and cultural memory (especially the Holocaust). His “liquid” books, including “Liquid Modernity” (2000), “Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds” (2003), “Liquid Life” (2005), “Liquid Fear” (2006), and the book presently considered, “Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty” (2006), for the most part seem to be shorter books whose aim is to adumbrate the arguments Bauman has made over the course of his career. The focus of “Liquid Times” is a meta-critique of globalization and all of the problems it presents, from rootlessness to the ubiquity of the security sate, with Bauman’s central thesis being that the consequences of globalization have seriously hindered attempts at international justice. The goal of globalization - to eradicate any trade barriers and therefore create “markets without frontiers” - results in the transition from a world where people are subject to the laws and protections of their home countries to one in which radical fear and lack of security are reified and the “fading of human bonds and the wilting of solidarity” reigns. This lack of security results in fear and a perceived lack of control, which in turn perpetuates and shores up the conspicuous shift toward national security that we have experienced in advanced liberal democracies. And so the pernicious cycle goes. In his comparison of cities, the globally located ones (that are able to participate in the fully integrated sphere of globalization) and locally located cities ones (those that aren’t), Bauman says that the job of the city has changed from protecting its inhabitants from outsiders to housing ghettoized populations of peripatetic transnationals and strangers, the “dumping ground for globally conceived and gestated problems.” Our new liquid times have also brought about an unprecedented number of refugees, both political and economic. Wars, which Bauman thinks are essentially local attempts to solve global problems, become intractable. The result is an “excess of humanity” – humanity as waste product – completely and utterly divested of property, personal identity, or even a state that will recognize their existence. Bauman suggests that democracy has ironically become an elitist affair, where the rich protect their interests and the poor continue to suffer from a lack of social safety nets and supportive governmental networks. He is also not terribly optimistic about the chances of gaining a pre-globalized utopia, a word which Thomas More first darkly noted could mean, homophonically, either “paradise” or “nowhere.” While it is still a paradise for some, our world has become too liquid to be anything but the latter for most of us. In the end, Bauman offers in every analysis of globalization the ultimate paradox of modernity: a permanent life shot through with impermanency. As I pointed out before, at least according to the back of the book, Bauman has taken the time to further detail his analyses in other books. However, from what I read here, I am not sure how many of his arguments are original. Books on globalization with themes of alienation and disenfranchisement are not unpopular in the field of sociology. However, Bauman’s wry wit definitely has me interested in reading more of his work, which I plan on reviewing in the future. ...more |
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| 4.10
| 10
| Oct 15, 2007
| Oct 15, 2007
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liked it
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Oscar Wilde once declared that “literary criticism is the only civilized form of autobiography,” and Geoffrey Hartman has obviously taken this apotheg
Oscar Wilde once declared that “literary criticism is the only civilized form of autobiography,” and Geoffrey Hartman has obviously taken this apothegm to heart. Closely associated with Yale University for most of his professional life, Hartman is one of the most well-known literary critics in the United States, and often identified with the Yale school of deconstruction, even though no overarching methodology can be applied to the entire body of his work. First, a word on the audience at which this book is aimed: it will be of little interest for most readers who are not at least moderately familiar with the last fifty years of literary criticism in Europe, and especially the American upending thereof in the 1970s and 1980s. The title of the book both is and is not a bit of self-conscious omphaloskepsis: while Hartman does a lot of name-dropping, he discusses many of those names in detail, or at least as much detail as a 180-page book could. Those particularly interested in Hartman’s contributions to Holocaust studies, memorial studies, and digitization will certainly find something interesting. Born in 1929 in Germany, Hartman was taken via Kindertransport to England until the end of World War II, when he was able to move to the United States to pursue his education. While he was doing his graduate work at Yale, and later when he was a professor there, he met a number of important people in the field, including but not limited to Paul de Man, Hans Robert Jauss, Derrida, Harold Bloom, Rene Wellek, and Erich Auerbach. Instead of turning his formidable power as analyst and critic toward himself, he looks at their ideas and offers the occasional insight of them as people, including passionate defenses of both de Man and Jauss against accusations concerning their questionable pasts. The book ends with a beautiful tribute to the German critic Erich Auerbach, whose “Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature” is one of the most important contributions to the genre. Beyond these occasional coruscations, we get precious few glimpses into his inner life, which is perhaps what many readers might want. But this wouldn’t be the first time in his life that he bucked a trend. The material in the book is wholly refracted through scholarly apparatus and his contribution to it, and therefore comes across as more aloof and impersonal. Hartman is a gentle, avuncular soul with a capacious intellect. His call for the continued close reading of literature is a vital one, as is his continuing suspicion of literary fads like postmodernism, in its all sundry incarnations. I recommend it for those interested in a meditative account of a life in reading and learning, both of which Hartman does with a considerable joie de vivre. ...more |
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“My Peter, I intend to try to be faithful … What does that mean? To love my country in my own way as you loved it in your way. And to make this love w
“My Peter, I intend to try to be faithful … What does that mean? To love my country in my own way as you loved it in your way. And to make this love work. To look at the young people and be faithful to them. Besides that I shall do my work, the same work, my child, which you were denied. I want to honor God in my work, too, which means I want to be honest, true and sincere … When I try to be like that, dear Peter, I ask you then to be around me, help me, show yourself to me. I know you are there, but I see you only vaguely, as if you were shrouded in mist. Stay with me…” – Kathe Kollwitz (artist), in a letter to her son Peter, who was killed in WWI This excerpt from a letter by Kathe Kollwitz, whose heartbreaking sculpture and prints encapsulated the loss of an entire generation, also addresses some of the concerns at the heart of Jay Winter’s “Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning,” which explores intellectual territory already trodden by the likes of Paul Fussell in his “The Great War and Modern Memory” and George Mosse in his “Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars” (which I reviewed for this site in January.) Unlike Mosse’s book, which looks at larger national and cultural factors, Winter hones in on how people coped with tragedy on a level unknown until the trench warfare of World War I. In the second half of the book, he looks at different artistic media – film, popular art, novels, and poetry – in an attempt to distill how they dealt differently with the loss, guilt, and trauma that was visited upon them by the War. We often think that the soldiers who fell in the War as Americans or Europeans, but of course some were from as far away as Australia. Winter argues that this affects the way even the most fundamental ways we relate to the War, especially the way that we mourn. He tells the story of Australian Vera Deakin (daughter of the pre-War Prime Minister Alfred Deakin), who was one of the most active members of the Australian Red Cross and searched endlessly for missing and unidentified soldiers. Families in Western Europe (where Winter spends most of his time in the book) read of their losses within days for the most part, but it sometimes took weeks or even months for those in Australia. Worse yet, some simply heard nothing more than that their loved one was “missing in action,” and many never heard anything at all. Culturally and aesthetically, we think of World War I as being the cynosure of modernism. However, Winter argues that in order to grieve, Europeans looked backward instead of forward. Spiritualism saw a huge resurgence during the War years. It was just one of the “powerfully conservative effects of the Great War on one aspect of European cultural history.” Instead of a burgeoning modernism, these years were much more dominated by Victorian sentimentalism and traditional religious and spiritual ideas. The second half of the book turns toward the arts for clearer insight on how grieving occurred, on both personal and national levels. One of the most interesting parts here is Winter’s short history of Images d’Epinal, a tradition of popular, often kitschy, French folk art that was very popular at the time, and often catered to aforementioned Victorian ideals and religious feelings. Again, the focus is on realism and the representationalism of the past, not the avant-garde. Winter ends by jumping all the way to World War II and noting how the grammar of mourning had changed in the wake of the Shoah. To quote Adorno, “It is barbarism to write poetry after Auschwitz.” Not long afterward, we start seeing the rise of even more self-consciously abstract and anti-representational in all different kinds of cultural expression. It would seem that much of the art world at the time agreed with Adorno’s appraisal. In the end, this book was not merely as good as the Mosse, which struck me as brilliant and well-argued. Nevertheless, Winter’s revisionist cultural history of World War I being a time of aesthetic conservatism and tradition is one worth considering; there is certainly enough evidence to both support and refute it. I plan on reading his “Remembering the War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century” soon. ...more |
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This volume, the fourth in the Twayne Modern American Thought and Culture series edited by Lewis Perry and Howard Brick, looks at American intellectua
This volume, the fourth in the Twayne Modern American Thought and Culture series edited by Lewis Perry and Howard Brick, looks at American intellectual history from 1880-1900. Cotkin covers this ground adeptly and even-handedly, from the pervasive influence of Darwinism on practically every area of human endeavor of the time to the ambiguous place of the woman in intellectual life. The book has its weak points, which I will mention at the end. The first part of the book is the best and offers some of the clearest insights, though Cotkin never really does get to the heart of the matter in attempting to define what modernism actually is for him. He uses the metaphor of a “tangled bank” – the same one that Darwin used in another context to describe nature. The themes are familiar ones: how our subjects are continually buffeted to and fro between moribund Victorianism and the new, ambiguous, questioning modernism. Cotkin does a superb job of detailing how far-reaching are the ideas of progress, often espoused in the guise of Darwinism. Even the leading liberal religious thinkers of the time – Henry Ward Beecher, Newman Smyth, Octavius Brooks Frothingham – co-opted the idea of progress to create a theology that ministered to the particularly Victorian (not modern) worldview. Former orthodoxy started to become laced with aspects of rationalism, but not necessarily for the scientific pretense it provided; in fact, more often than not, this aspect of religious thought devolved into a calming anodyne for the complacent middle class, an appeal to their fetishization of progress. He covers Pragmatism, that fresh American philosophical tradition, very well, including how its professionalization also led to the development of psychology as its own academic discipline. Even in the realm of psychology the freedom versus determinism debate comes up again, with William Graham Sumner firmly on the side of passively accepting Nature’s laws, while William James suggests there is room for human volition. In one chapter, Cotkin does a fine job in detailing the perhaps not terribly surprising extent to which racism dominated the fields of academic anthropology and ethnology. Lewis Henry Morgan’s work with the Iroquois and John Wesley Powell’s involvement with the U.S. Geological Survey are also indicative of the search for parallelism, order, and logic that Cotkin has already illustrated. Naïve optimism was not relegated to the middle-class, however. As James C. Wellington of Columbian College said, “There is a limitless vista opened (though not an absolutely unlimited one) for the prospective working of better laws, purer justice, wiser economics, richer science, and higher morality.” By the end of the century, as the influence of Franz Boas grew, anthropology began to slowly slough off its former assumptions and found that “the contextual understanding of culture … was complex and inexact.” The second half of the book provides information that is just as interesting, but much more derivative. I was introduced to some new names – Frances Benjamin Johnston and Gertrude Kasebier – but the background story has been told much more effectively elsewhere. In the closing chapters, Cotkin touches on the growth of American consumerism, and gives a few quick and insightful sketches of Stephen Crane, Louis Sullivan, Thorstein Veblen, and Edgar Saltus. For an undergraduate student who is looking for a quick overview of the reigning ideas of the time, this book is perfectly sufficient. The first half is worth reading all the way through for the interesting undercurrents of rationalism and progress Cotkin develops, but the second half should serve mostly as biographical reference material. ...more |
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| 3.78
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| Jan 01, 1956
| Jan 01, 1956
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it was amazing
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Perry Miller’s “Errand Into the Wilderness” more than any other book I’ve read in a long time makes you realize sometimes how little education our edu
Perry Miller’s “Errand Into the Wilderness” more than any other book I’ve read in a long time makes you realize sometimes how little education our educational institutions actually provide. Think of the Puritans. The word conjures up images of earnest, hard-working folk bedecked in golden buckles and ruffles eager to spread their moral superiority to anyone within earshot. We think of their biggest accomplishment as managing to survive disease and pestilence for so long, despite their backward ways. The history we know of the Puritans is a history of events – things they did, their names, their travels. Miller’s fascinating book opens up Puritan history for those interested in intellectual history – a history of ideas, theology, and polity. And what a fascinating world he uncovers. While the main focus here is Puritanism, Miller does occasionally do a bit of wandering; some of the latter essays explore Emerson and the formation of American nationalist ideology. There are ten essays, all of which are full of the enticing, meaty history of ideas, so I won’t be able to cover all the ground of the book here, though I would like to give a short précis of some of those essays which I thought to be the most impressive. The book’s title comes from one Samuel Danforth, whose sermon “A Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand into the Wilderness” sets the existential, searching tone whose tenor can be found in each one of these essays. In the title essay, Miller notes the dual meaning of the word “errand.” It can mean a task done by an inferior for a superior, or it can refer to the task alone, the very action itself. The first generation of Puritans to set foot on North American soil never thought of themselves as Americans. They were just Englishmen and Englishwomen whose task was to see to it that the “errand” of the Reformation could be enacted on Earth. In other words, they saw themselves very much performing an errand in the first sense. After the English Civil War had failed to turn the heads of the world to their glorious City on a Hill, they were left with a vast wilderness. These essays are how the Puritans fashioned a sense of meaning, and eventually, in time, American identity, out of those very raw ingredients whose presence still make themselves felt in American life – Calvinist theology, a sense of community, and profound intolerance. “The Marrow of Puritan Divinity” is one of the longest, and best, essays in the collection. It covers the shift from strict fundamentalist Calvinism to covenantal theology that took place sometime within the early part of the seventeenth century. In 1550, strict Calvinism was still acceptable. The Scientific Revolution was still far off, and the abject nature of human beings was still de rigueur. The absolute and capricious power of God could still accept or reject human souls according to His whim. By 1650, however, the unscientific worldview that would allow this kind of God had, in some respects, given away. Theology had better learn to justify the ways of God to man or else risk losing some of its influence. Some of the first important Puritan theologians – including Cotton, Hooker, Shepard, and Bulkley – began to constitute a new school that broke from Calvinism in one important way: the incorporation of covenantal theology. No longer, according to these theologians, did you have to believe in God despite his mercurial nature as you used to. Now when you professed a belief in God, you and He entered into a covenant – he turned into a God who was capable of making and keeping a promise. “He has become a God chained – by His own consent, it is true, but nevertheless a God restricted and circumscribed – a God who can be counted upon, a God who can be lived with. Man can always know where God is and what he intends” (63). In a lot of ways this essay forms the ideological core of the book, since Miller will discuss in the later essays many of the ways in which the covenant was absolutely essential in understanding Puritan civil society, church, and state. In fact, Winthrop’s constitutional ideas were based upon the idea of men coming together and forming an earthly covenant. In “Nature and the National Ego,” Miller again uses the trope of the wilderness and connects it to Emerson and American identity writ large. He says that, in contrast to Europe’s “Nature” (which is effeminate, inferior, derivative), America has founded itself the original, masculine quintessence of the wilderness. To support this idea, he points out that many Americans intellectuals in the nineteenth century began to worry about the possible effects of industrialization and the encroachment of “civilization,” fearing that its appearance might be proportional to the uniquely American identity that might they might have to cede. He goes so far as to say that “if there be such a thing as an American character, it took shape under the molding influence of the conceptions of Nature and civilization” (210). Both chronologically and ideologically, these are the two essays that couch the rest of this wonderful collection. I would recommend these essays for anyone in search of an alternate view to the prevailing idea of America as being originally founded on religious tolerance and individualism, or anyone excited by old-fashioned American intellectual history. This is some of the best of its kind. ...more |
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| May 01, 1958
| May 06, 2005
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Modernity was a troubling thing for those who had to live through it. Pure, objective, unassailable science was quickly supplanting religious ideas, a
Modernity was a troubling thing for those who had to live through it. Pure, objective, unassailable science was quickly supplanting religious ideas, and paring those ideas down to what they were – mere myths perpetrated on us by those who wanted to exert social and cultural control. Or at least this was the conclusion reached by many who, with the advent of a new way of approaching universal truth, now wanted nothing to do with that old-time religion. But not everyone felt the same way. This very short book introduces the thought of Rudolph Bultmann, one of the leading German theologians of the early twentieth century and proponent of “demythologization,” and Karl Jaspers, the well-known German existentialist and philosopher. First, there is a very capable introduction by R. Joseph Hoffmann, followed by an opening statement by Jaspers, a reply by Bultmann, and then a closing reply by Jaspers. Jaspers and Bultmann both being dyed-in-the-wool Heideggerians, it is interesting to read about their intellectual justifications regarding the respective virtues and weaknesses of hermeneutics as applied to religious myth. As I mentioned earlier, toward the latter part of Bultmann’s career, he started to talk about something called demythologization, in which he attempts to divest religious meaning and intent from the original myths in which they are couched. For Bultmann, the Ascension and the Virgin Birth (just to name two highly representative religious myths) mean something, but the fact that the religious content is ensconced in the language of the miraculous is a serious stumbling block for the modern man whose mind has come to see the miracle as ridiculous and impossible. Therefore, these myths need to be reconfigured – divested – of their Biblical form and given a structure which is makes getting at their meaning and significance possible for someone living in the twentieth century. Jaspers, however, sees the element of myth as indispensable from the content of religious belief itself. Jaspers claims that “reading” these myths without their mythical structures is impossible. He rejects the idea that any religion can be understood apart from its mythical origins. The topology of the origins themselves, he argues, is essential to our understanding. Religious myths are not there to provide us with a decoding project; their cutting away cannot happen without the simultaneous disappearance of any possibility of a religious message. Myth is, for Jaspers, das Umgreifende (the Great Encompassing) by and through which we can escape the worn dualities of subjectivity and objectivity, and achieve a sort of transcendence. Jaspers saw Bultmann’s project of demythologization as a sanitizing one, one that failed to understand myth as an essential vehicle for apprehending and describing the transcendent. Jaspers comes close to the one that Northrop Frye constructs in “The Great Code: The Bible and Literature,” in which he suggests that modern attempts to read the Bible are often foiled because we no longer read and write in the mythical; rather, he thinks, following Vico’s tripartite theory of language, that our system of writing has since taken on empirical, positivistic concerns. While Frye thinks that one cannot read the Bible without myth since it is written in myth, Jaspers respects the mythic, and asserts that the religious person must come to terms with it. Jaspers accuses Bultmann of a scientism which sees itself as being responsible for not be accused of foolish mythologies. I would like to include a word about the construction and editing of the book itself. It has a wonderful introduction by R. Joseph Hoffmann which provides one of the greatest contexts and explanations of the rise of liberal theology in the nineteenth century. However, Jaspers’ first parry in the conversation includes a lot of material from his Existenzphilosophie which is completely unnecessarily for the overall understanding of the text and the content of the argument at hand. This part of the text includes explanation the reader could have done without, like “We cannot think unless something becomes an object for us. To be conscious means to live in that clarity which is made possible by the split between I and the object. But it also means to live within the walls constituted by the split between the I and something known to be an object.” And so on. If this language had been excised, the book would have made its argument in tighter, more cogent terms. Also, of the 88 pages devoted to the back-and-forth of Bultmann and Jaspers, Bultmann is allotted a grand total of 12 pages, which makes me think the editor may have had a slight bias. In any case, the substance of the debate is fascinating, but these weak points to detract from the overall rating. I would recommend a close examination of these ideas for anyone interested in the shapes and trends of liberal theology in the twentieth century, but one can probably find another publication whose editor is less clumsy in communicating them. ...more |
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| Apr 17, 1986
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There are many books that provide a systematic history of a certain subject (Menand’s “Metaphysical Club,” for example, looks at the birth of philosop
There are many books that provide a systematic history of a certain subject (Menand’s “Metaphysical Club,” for example, looks at the birth of philosophical pragmatism in the United States), but it’s much rarer to find a book that starts with a philosophical foundation, and then goes on beyond it and reaches into another field. That is precisely what Kloppenberg does here, focusing on much the same subject that Menand discusses in his book. The project is impressive in its scope: starting with the birth of American pragmatism and European historicism, he argues that many of the great liberal and progressive social reformers of this time period, unimpressed with the various dualisms that had dominated philosophy since the time of Descartes, used pragmatism and the ideals of philosophical liberalism to undergird their social programs and ideas. During the first third of the book, Kloppenberg details why previous philosophical ideas proved unable to deal with complex social and philosophical problems, and why this dissatisfaction necessitated the birth of pragmatism. He focuses here on six thinkers and their critiques of previous ideas: they are William James, Alfred Fouillee, Wilhelm Dilthey, T. H. Green, Henry Sidgwick, and John Dewey. The general criticism they level against previous philosophical thought was its interaction between subject and object (or, in the language of psychology, stimulus and response), which assumed they could be separated and thought of as different entities. Dewey especially takes this idea to task, calling for experience to be understood as a unified whole, instead of a series of subjects understanding different objects. He said that we need to think of experience as a “reflex circuit instead of an arc,” i.e., not one-way, but something more resembling a simultaneously feedback loop. James, whose early career was just as much involved in psychology as it was in philosophy, elaborated on these points, creating what is in effect a uniquely American epistemology focusing on the wholeness of lived experience instead of abstract, theoretical interactions between the mind and reality. The Europeans of the group, especially Fouillee and Dilthey, tried to correct for the ahistorical trends that were prevalent in a lot of philosophy. Descartes and Kant had conceived of knowledge has happening in the utterly disconnected brain, unconditioned by culture or society. To even study one person in a specific context is pointless, since, according to Dilthey, “the connection of the individual with humanity is a reality … The starting point lies in my consciousness so far as it contains a coherence of knowledge which is in agreement with other consciousnesses perceived by me – a coherence therefore which extends beyond my own consciousness.” Here, Dilthey gives what is, more or less, a pragmatist theory of truth – one that emphasizes coherence more than correspondence with reality. Disenfranchised by both philosophical idealism and empiricism, these thinkers opted for history as the source of immanent critique and the basis for all foundational judgments. Kloppenberg then makes the move away from these radicals’ (he’s always calling them “radicals” or “renegades”) critique of epistemology and toward their critique of ethics. Previous systems – and he discusses especially Benthamite utilitarianism – provided a final, lasting system of ethical principles. As Fouillee noted in “The Psychology of Idees-Forces,” while the dualism of pleasure and pain “may constitute the dominant quality of original sensations,” it is hardly the sole content of human consciousness. By failing to differentiate between among experiences, he argues that Bentham’s calculus of happiness ultimately proves inadequate. There was also a growing acknowledgement between public (the commonweal) and private interests (which Kloppenberg terms “prudence,” but might more appropriately be called “self-interest”). Sidgwick, Dilthey, and James especially doubted that tragic collisions between self-interest and the requirements of justice could ever be prevented. All six thought that politics was ultimately reducible to philosophical questions over values, about which there can be no final answers. While the first half of the book focuses on the history of philosophical tradition and a critique thereof, the second half considers how contemporaries expressed similar ideals, though they sought to locate them in the action of social reform and progressivism. Again, he presents six representative thinkers: Eduard Bernstein, Richard T. Ely, Beatrice Webb, Sidney Webb, Jean Jaures, and Walter Rauschenbusch. Kloppenberg claims that “there is a distinctive continuity between the two groups’ philosophical and political ideas.” The similarity here seems to be mostly in their respective views of history. Only Bernstein spoke of a “critique of socialist reason,” but all of them thought that socialism should let go of its scientific pretense. The pretense to science is just a smug confidence “in the inevitable triumph of the proletariat.” Instead, they argued for a radically empiricist approach to historical understanding, approaching knowledge as a “conscious process of truth testing and its recognition of the historical and qualitative dimensions of understanding.” In the last few chapters, another set of six (yes, a third set!) are considered in the context of mostly European power politics. Those thinkers are Leon Bourgeois, Leonhard T. Hobhouse, Max Weber, Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and John Dewey (again). The second half of the book begins to flirt with something Susan Haack once referred to in a New Criterion article as “vulgar Rortyism.” As I mentioned above, these thinkers criticized Marxist conceptions of history for their scientism, but Kloppenberg almost leads the reader to believe that pragmatism should be in the service of democratic politics. He also manages to turn pragmatism – a relatively well-defined, mostly American, philosophical tradition – into something smacking of mushy relativism. Granted, the author never includes pragmatists like Peirce who emphasize the role of logic and science in any of the 17 people that he examines, this strand of thought seems to get lost – a dubious trait in what seems to be a book about the historical development of pragmatism and Anglo-European historicism. While I found the intellectual connections in the first part of the book fascinating, Kloppenberg fails when trying to show that those same ideas influenced the second and third groups of six. He just flatly claims that the philosophers influenced the social reformers and progressives, but never connects the threads for the reader, which is a serious fault in a book of intellectual history. And none of this is helped by the fact that Kloppenberg insists on covering the contributions of so many people. In parts, it seems like a rush to list all the contributions and name the important books associated with one of the above. For sheer ambition and breadth, I think this is an interesting book to look into, especially if you’re excited by Kloppenberg’s interdisciplinarity. But for being included on so many graduate-level European and American intellectual history syllabi, I was surprised to find the book has the weaknesses that it does. ...more |
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“The Great Code” really re-configured the way that I conceive of the Bible as a literary document. After two centuries of historical criticism (or nar
“The Great Code” really re-configured the way that I conceive of the Bible as a literary document. After two centuries of historical criticism (or narrative criticism as it’s called when applied to the Bible), it is refreshing to see a whole new interpretive methodology which looks inward at the Bible, instead of trying to test its significance by how well it correlates to something outside of itself. And that is the central thesis to Frye’s argument – that the Bible is a unified mythology, replete with its own literary devices, that hardly needs confirmation from history or archaeology to successfully tell the story (mythos) that it tells. Because of this, the book has been the target of a number of appropriate historicist critiques, all claiming that one can’t cut wholly separate the work of literature from its social and cultural context. Although these criticisms aren��t all fair themselves, as Frye even considers the structure of certain metaphors (like the ubiquitous flood myth) modulate themselves repeatedly via literary transmission into new texts. The first part of the book consists of a highly condensed theory of language which Frye employs in the second half. I found this part just as useful, yet often elided in critical reviews. According to Frye, his own ideas are highly influenced by Vico’s “Scienza Nuova” which posits the idea of a cyclical theory of language wherein each human epoch uses language in a unique, irreducible way. In his tripartite interpretation, there is the hieroglyphic stage in which words have the pure energy of potential magic, the hieratic stage in which words begin to reflect an objective reality of a transcendent order, and the demotic stage, where prose continues its subordination to “the inductive and fact-gathering process,” and seems to be the stage we remain in today. If this evolution has taken us full circle from feel the pure immediacy of metaphor, how are we supposed to read the Bible (whose language is, of course, one of pure metaphorical immediacy)? Nietzsche said that God had lost his function, but Vico (and Frye in turn) might have replied that the Bible is simply entombed in a lost part of the cycle, inaccessible and unable to be interpreted by the demotic. His neo-Viconian theory of language goes some way in offering a theory for the vulgarism that so often takes the name of Biblical interpretation: “With the general acceptance of demotic and descriptive criteria in language, such literalism becomes a feature of anti-intellectual Christian populism” (45). The second part begins the literary criticism as one would more formally recognize it. According to Frye, the Bible can operate independently precisely because it functions and maintains its own body of rhetorical devices, including metaphor, and type, antitype, and archetype. “We clearly have to consider the possibility that metaphor is not an incidental ornament, but one of its controlling modes of thought” (54). Metaphor and trope become the sole measure of the Bible’s inner verbal consistency. The “type” and “antitype” are essentially import; he construes the entire Bible as a series of musical call-and-response gestures between the Old and New Testaments: the Resurrection is the response to the Old Testament Promised Land, the baptism in the River Jordan is the New Testament’s answer to the Old Testament’s Red Sea. He also integrates a number of other complex typologies, including the Creation-Incarnation-Death-Descent to Hell-Harrowing of Hell-Resurrection-Ascension-Heaven motif and a nomenclature of types, including the “demonic,” “analogical,” and “apocalyptic.” This universe – multiverse, even – of complex metaphor, meaning, and type are the ones that we continue to recognize, read, and struggle with today, which accounts for the fact that myth goes a long way in exploring who we are and what we do as a community. Notice how Frye deftly bypasses any theological or strictly philosophical concerns. As Frank Kermode would comment almost a decade after the book was published, “Just as he exiled questions of value from the Anatomy [of Criticism], he exiles from his Biblical criticism questions of belief.” I was considering giving this book four stars, because of my occasional disagreements with it (including the arguments from historicism mentioned above). But I can’t in good conscience do that. Just for the interpretive vistas that it opens up, I feel that anything less than five would convey an impression that I was less than impressed, which certainly is not the case. ...more |
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