Much depends, of course, on what the "religious turn" constitutes. I spend
much of my time studying things religious (or biblical), not for any
confessional reasons (it strikes me as sad that any study of religious
culture has to be prefaced by some form of authorial confession of faith --
no one studying Ovidian influences feels compelled to clarify their own
paganism), but because it seems to me that (a) religion impinged on
virtually everything in the period, and (b) it's in the realm of the
religious (broadly consider) that one often finds people at their most
serious and engaged. I found Diarmuid McCullough's remarks at RSA
encouraging and important -- he argued for a more confessionally detached,
indeed secular, approach to Reformation studies. My hopes would be the
same for studies of religion and (or in) literature. It would be
refreshing if we could finally get beyond the old Protestant-Catholic
polemic (which doesn't mean, of course, rejecting either Catholicism or
Protestantism, not to mention Judaism or Islam).
On the matter of "new" approaches more generally, my feeling tends to be
that the more neatly I can peg a critic as "X" or "Y," the less interesting
and useful I generally find her or his work. I'd advocate a New Syncretism
(though maybe we should drop the "New"s altogether!).
On New Historicism, isn't it the case that some of the general principles
-- the importance of situating literary works in their historical-cultural
contexts, say -- have become part of the critical mainstream, absorbed into
the general discourse, but that we have (I would say happily) moved beyond
the narrowly Foucauldian, oppression-and-subversion model of culture?
Hannibal
At 05:29 PM 4/24/05 -0500, you wrote:
>Oddly Jackson and Marotti focus on the ethical aspects of the "religious
>turn" to the exclusion of the political. Terry Eagleton has gone back to his
>Catholic roots to salvage Marxist theory with Aristotle and Aquinas. Alain
>Badiou has gone to St. Paul for a new militant figure. Likewise, Slavoj
>Zizek wants a "materialist fundamentalism" and goes to Lenin, Lacan, St.
>Paul and G. K. Chesterton. Stanley Fish, who predicted the "religious turn"
>as well, keeps gleefully dancing on the enlightenment corpse of liberal
>pluralism, and Jurgen Habermas is making common cause with Benedict XVI to
>save it. Fascinating time. -Dan Knauss
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Michael Seanger [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> > Sent: Saturday, April 23, 2005 1:03 PM
> > Subject: Re: Momentum? Trajectory?
> >
> >
> > I got that article and read it -- it's very interesting. Of
> > course, I couldn't help notice that Jackson and Marotti's
> > touted "Turn to Religion" sounds remarkably appropriate to
> > our own post-9/11 zeitgeist, with "The Passion of the
> > Christ", God on the cover of Newsweek with some frequency,
> > etc. Of course, I think Marotti and Jackson have a point --
> > my own criticism addresses pious literature, because I think
> > it's very interesting. But another thing that strikes me is
> > that J and M's notion of where we are going seems remarkably
> > different to Harry's. And neither stance attaches itself to
> > a marketable banner headline -- it seems as if we refer to
> > what we do as New Historicism, almost by default (apres la lettre?).
> >
> > Michael
> >
> > Bryan John Lowrance wrote:
> >
> > >Dear Michael,
> > >
> > >An interesting article for this is Ken Jackson and Arthur F.
> > Marotti,
> > >"The Turn to Religion in Early Modern Studies," Criticism,
> > vol, 46, n.
> > >1. (Winter 2004) pp. 167-90. It provides good bibliography and
> > >overview of a lot of recent scholarship as well as providing some
> > >interesting theoretical analysis. If your school subscribes
> > to Project
> > >Muse, it's available on that.
> > >
> > >Best,
> > >
> > >Bryan Lowrance.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >>Dear All,
> > >>
> > >>I'm just finishing up a project with a student on her way to grad
> > >>school, and the idea is to get her oriented on graduate study
> > >>(literary studies generally, and English Renaissance in
> > particular).
> > >>She asked an interesting question yesterday, which was,
> > where are we
> > >>currently? When I was at her stage in 1992, we all had a
> > pretty clear
> > >>idea of where the momentum was in literary scholarship, even though
> > >>there were clearly differing schools and opinions -- all
> > scholarship
> > >>seemed to be positioned in one way or another with regard
> > to the New
> > >>Historicism. So I thought I'd turn the question out to the
> > group: Is
> > >>there a collective sense that we are operating in a
> > particular phase
> > >>of criticism -- either as Spenserians, Sidneyans, or more generally?
> > >>
> > >>All the best,
> > >>
> > >>Michael
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>
> >
>
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Hannibal Hamlin
Assistant Professor of English
The Ohio State University
1680 University Drive
Mansfield, OH 44906
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