Love and Good Reasons

Oehlschlaeger Fritz Oehlschlaeger

Description

Insisting on the vital, productive relationship between ethics and the study of literature, Love and Good Reasons demonstrates ways of reading novels and stories from a Christian perspective. Fritz Oehlschlaeger argues for the study of literature as a training ground for the kinds of thinking on which moral reasoning depends. He challenges methods of doing ethics that attempt to specify universally binding principles or rules and argues for the need to bring literature back into conversation with the most basic questions about how we should live.Love and Good Reasons combines postliberal narrative theology-especially Stanley Hauerwas's Christian ethics and Alasdair MacIntyre's idea of traditional inquiry-with recent scholarship in literature and ethics including the work of Martha Nussbaum, J. Hillis Miller, Wayne Booth, Jeffrey Stout, and Richard Rorty. Oehlschlaeger offers detailed readings of literature by five major authors-Herman Melville, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Henry James, and Stephen Crane. He examines their works in light of biblical scripture and the grand narratives of Israel, Jesus, and the Church. Discussing the role of religion in contemporary higher education, Oehlschlaeger shares his own experiences of teaching literature from a religious perspective at a state university.

Sujets

• USA
• Christian theology
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 14 janvier 2003
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822384670
• Langue: English

Extrait

Love and Good Reasons

j

F R I T Z O E H L S C H L A E G E R

Love and Good Reasons

P O S T L I B E R A L A P P R OAC H E S

T O C H R I S T I A N E T H I C S A N D

L I T E R AT U R E

Duke University Press Durham and London 2003

∫2003 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of

America on acid-free paper$

Designed by C. H. Westmoreland

Typeset in Weiss with Din Mittelschrift

display by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-

Publication Data appear on the last

printed page of this book.

‘‘Love has nothing to do with good reasons.’’

—Isabel Archer to Lord Warburton, in Henry James,

The Portrait of a Lady

Charity is not a figurative precept.

It is a horrible thing to say that Christ, who came to replace

figures by the truth, came only to set up the figure of charity

in place of the reality that was there before.

‘‘If the light be darkness, what will the darkness be?’’

—Blaise Pascal,Pensees,849,

trans. A. J. Krailsheimer

contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Literary Criticism and Christian Ethics in Service to One Another 9 2. Toward a Christian Ethics of Reading, or, Why We Cannot Be Done with Bartleby 49 3. The ‘‘Best Blessing of Existence’’: ‘‘Conscious Worth’’ inEmma83 4. Honor, Faithfulness, and Community in Anthony Trollope’s The WardenandHe Knew He Was Right126 5. The ‘‘Very Temple of Authorised Love’’: Henry James andThe Portrait of a Lady169 6. A Light That Has Been There from the Beginning: Stephen Crane and the Gospel of John 212 Afterword: Postliberal Christian Scholarship: An Engagement with Rorty and Stout 251 Notes 271 Bibliography 297 Index 307

acknowledgments

I am convinced that our reasons for acting morally are rooted deep in our loves. Most people do not ask, Why be moral? They simply act from something like Aquinas’s assumption that the good must be loved and made real. Simone Weil argued that one of the illusions created by ‘‘imag- inative literature’’ was that evil is ‘‘romantic and varied,’’ whereas good is boring. She thought just the opposite to be true in life and great art: real evil ‘‘is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.’’ ‘‘Real good,’’ on the other hand, is ‘‘always new, marvelous, intoxicating.’’ My experience confirms Weil’s judgment. I have been the recipient of many real and extraordinary goods, and I have always found them varied, engaging, and inexhaustible. They have often come, of course, in the form of people, some of whom I can try to thank here. My intellectual debt to Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre is enormous. George Hendrick has provided me with a model of scholar- ship and friendship for nearly thirty years. James F. Childress kindly included me in a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar where I first encountered the work of Hauerwas, MacIntyre, Nussbaum, and others integral to this study. J. D. Stahl introduced me to the work of John Howard Yoder; Rob Patzig, to that of Emmanuel Levinas. Tom Gardner and Robert Benne read sections of the manuscript and provided impor- tant suggestions and encouragement. Katherine Soniat kept me apprised of articles chronicling literary study’s decline from where it ought to be, at the center of humanistic education. Peter Graham has been a wonder- ful conversation partner in all things literary and ethical for many years. My understanding of religious ethics has benefited greatly from discus- sions with Ned Wisnefske and Paul Hinlicky. My readers at Duke University Press provided me with extraordinarily detailed and helpful reviews of an earlier version of this book. Editors Reynolds Smith and Sharon Torian insisted I write a better book than I would have without their care and attention. I have received so much daily good from my coworkers in the English Department at Virginia Tech that I cannot begin to thank them adequately.