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Our Turn Now? Imitation and the Theological Turn in Literary Studies

2009; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 58; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/014833310905800217

2056-5666

Tiffany Eberle Kriner,

Theological Perspectives and Practices

Under a starry sky I was taking a walk, On a ridge overlooking neon cities, With my companion, spirit of desolation, Who was running around and sermonizing, Saying that I was not necessary, for if not I, then someone else Would be walking here, trying to understand his age. Had I died long ago nothing would have changed. same stars, cities, and countries Would have been seen with other eyes. world and its labors would go on as they do. For Christ's sake, get away from me. You've tormented me enough, I said. It's not up to me to judge calling of men. And my merits, if any, I won't know anyway. --Czeshw Milosz, Temptation call for papers that initiated 2007 MLA seminar on The Turn to Religion in Literary Studies was worded to elicit a variety of responses. Yet brief prompt also seems in its language to offer a partial reading of to religion--a greater openness to of religious aspects of texts as religious--as well as a comment on positions of believers within during recent decades: Seminar papers are invited that explore ways in which in to by strengthening a critical sensibility that weighs delicate registers of belief and unbelief; by developing more vigorous theoretical paradigms that take religion seriously; and by demonstrating that commitments lead to greater interpretive clarity. An invitation for papers about Christians can participate in a turn to religion seems in part to suggest that turn has been undertaken primarily by who do not define themselves as believers or who expressly avoid relating their religious commitments to scholarship. comparative language searching for more strength, more vigor and seriousness, and greater clarity may indicate a conflict between Christian designed as subjects of papers, and those assumed to already be comprising turn. Such ideas are not uncommon in already published pieces that either propose or characterize religious turns in critical theory and studies. For example, Jenny Franchot's 1995 piece Invisible Domain: Religion and American Literary Studies, even while castigating discipline for seeming to assume that believing and thinking are mutually exclusive and calling for a greater focus on religion, suggests that a neglect of religious subject matter may reflect how unimportant religion is in lives of (840). Franchot observes in her article that fear of being cast in the light means that consistently translate or demystify religious ideas of writers they (840). Seeking to calm fears of those who worried that of religion would compromise their scholarly position, she insists that there is no requirement that scholars must themselves adopt religious insights or practices of those they study (841). She instead suggests treatment of religious questions as religious with impartiality and without fear of contagion. Franchot suggests that more and better work on religion ought to be done in Americanist studies, though she admits rarely things we don't like, let alone consider ourselves responsible for conveying accounts that are as impartial as possible (840). wrong light Franchot hints at may be one she casts on earlier scholars: a label marking their work as driven by hagiographical or polemical impulses that used to characterize some work on (838). Beyond American studies, other critics and theorists have worried about (potentially negative) effects of religious commitments on integrity of scholarship. In Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti's 2004 piece The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies in Criticism, for example, authors declare that accounts of religion in Early Modern England were compromised by literary . …