The Making of Many Books: Christianity and Literary Studies
(delivered 4/24/09, at CGSA)
To start off, I’d like to thank you guys for the chance to speak on this topic—as many of you can attest (okay, okay, you and some of my students), once I get started talking about literature and/or theology, it’s rather difficult to get me to shut up. So if I seem to be leaving out large chunks of argument, it’s probably because I, too, want to eat dinner at some point tonight. But with that caveat, let’s get started. It’s been about eighteen months since I last prattled to you about literature and theology, and they’ve been eighteen rather important months in terms of my own experience with and thinking about literary studies. Since my last talk, long long ago (well, summer 07) in a church basement far far away, I’ve had a chance to learn a lot more about my field and think a lot more about my place as a Christian scholar within it. As I finished up my MA in 2008 and survived the slightly nerve-wracking PhD application process, and more recently as I’ve drafted preliminary goals and descriptions for my dissertation research on Christianity and 19th-century American literature, I’ve been able to crystallize some of my ideas about this whole Christian intellectual enterprise. Perhaps more importantly, during the same period I’ve been able to teach four classes related to tonight’s topic, including a Bible as Literature course this quarter, and to discuss some of that work with some great Christian colleagues at the Following Christ conference this past December. I mention all this not because I consider myself an expert on Christianity and literature, by any means, but to remind you (and myself) that more and more this is the shape that my academic calling is taking, at least for now.
But since only part of my life takes place in the academy, I actually want to start off with a slightly more banal example: a conversation I had last Friday afternoon, with one of the local National City bank officers. I was there to re-open my savings account, and she was there to process the requisite paperwork and make the requisite small talk. Somehow, in between her dire warnings against credit card abuse and her equally dire warnings against not getting and using a credit card, say, yesterday, the topic of my profession came up. As soon as I revealed that, yes, I was an English major, she told me that “we could have used you here a few minutes ago.” Without missing a beat, and almost without thinking about it, I shot back, “Grammar dispute?” I was right, though I almost wish I wasn’t. Perhaps, just perhaps, there might have been an intra-office debate over the relative literary merits of Charles Brockden Brown vs. James Fenimore Cooper, or a fast-paced repartee regarding the philosophical sources of Moby-Dick, or even just a burning question about which century Gerard Manley Hopkins belonged to. But grammar? For a fleeting moment I felt rather like Marvin the Paranoid Android from the Hitchhiker trilogy: “Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they want me to delete an extraneous comma. Call that job satisfaction, 'cause I don't.”
Now, don’t get me wrong. Particularly in my part-time job as a freelance editor, extraneous commas are my bread and butter, or more to the point, my burger and fries. Though I’d really rather answer the question “What do you do with an English major” with “marry her” than with “hunt for wayward punctuation” (though now that I think about it, there are worse first dates than hunting for wayward punctuation together.) the practical end of literary studies we shall always have with us. And when I try to think about what constitutes a Christian literary studies in that context, it seems a bit silly to talk about fixing capitalization for the furtherance of the Kingdom. Even the prospect of teaching the ever-present sections of freshman composition doesn’t exactly inspire rhapsodies, yet in the minds of many, an English PhD seems to have little other use, Christian or not. The cosmologists among us may grapple with the awesome and occasionally terrifying origins of the universe, the biologists may coax cures for cancer out of recalcitrant zebrafish, and even the theoretical physicists might just lay the groundwork for warp drive someday. But the literature folks? We grade papers. We teach students. And maybe once in a while we can point out a nifty allusion during Bible study. Most of us, quite honestly, are content to sit in an office or a classroom and talk about otherwise obscure authors and otherwise moldy books.
Okay, so I’m exaggerating slightly: at least within the academy, most people know that English does involve some level of serious research and real scholarly contributions. That end of things isn’t without its problems either, however. Particularly in the last forty years, English departments have become increasingly interdisciplinary, drawing together threads from materials that might otherwise be delegated to history, philosophy, political science, or even religious studies. My own embryonic dissertation does just that, and frankly that’s part of what attracted me to the field in the first place: the chance to study a lot of different areas of the humanities while still remaining grounded in creative literature. But this level of interdisciplinarity also means that new ideas travel even more quickly to and through English departments, even (and sometimes especially) those ideas that challenge traditional views of art, philosophy, morality, and theology. Deconstruction, radical feminism, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and yes, even that amorphous mass of ideas known as postmodernism, all occupy their own niches of my profession, and all have their own proverbial bones to pick with Biblical Christianity.
This division of labor in turn tends to create a problematic environment for Christian scholars, particularly those who hold to conservative politics or theology, and not just because the average academician relies on CNN or The Daily Show for information about what Christians are “really like.” Many of my colleagues—and here I’m speaking of the profession more broadly, not just within OSU English—associate Christianity with what they see as outmoded and exclusionary ways of “doing literary studies,” and with reductive and simplistic scholarship. After all, the argument goes, if you’re really committed to all that God stuff and can’t manage to keep it out of your professional work, obviously you would ignore or distort any evidence that posed a threat to your deep-seated ideology. (In the interests of finishing this talk before midnight, I’ll spare you the tangent I could embark on now—but rest assured, it’s there.) Meanwhile, outsiders often criticize English departments, and do so with some justification, as being repositories of particularly egregious postmodern excess and thus of tuition dollars (or worse, tax dollars) wasted on frivolous (or even dangerous) academic projects. During the conservative critique of higher education in the 80s and 90s, for instance, English departments often bore the brunt of criticism, as we seemed to do little but prove the point of Ecclesiastes 12:12: “of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”
Amidst such battles, what’s a Christian literary scholar to do, and how can we, as a body of believers and a body of rather bright people, come to grips with this rather vexed battlefield of ideas? Well, I’m not going to sit here and lecture you on how you should read more good books, rediscover the classics, or even encourage your undergrad friends to enroll in my next Bible as Literature course. Besides the fact that I’ve already given that talk a couple summers back, I think the case for the “library as armory,” to use James Emery White’s phrase, has been made pretty solidly already. On the Christian side, Jim Sire, Leland Ryken, Gene Veith, and Cleanth Brooks have all made strong arguments for the value of literature to a Christian. And they’re not alone: besides the early 20th-century secular defenses of reading, scholars such as Wayne Booth, Jim Phelan, Denis Donoghue, and even Harold Bloom have renewed our attention to the ethical aspects of reading and writing. So rather than rehearsing their arguments, I want to ask a slightly different set of questions: what opportunities exist for “studying Christianly” in an English department, and how might the process fit with what has been called “Kingdom purposes”?
To start addressing these questions, and indeed to make any meaningful links between academia and Christianity, we should first of all note that we’re operating, by necessity as much as by choice, within an institutional context. To study and teach English Christianly, at least at this stage of my career, means that I organize my teaching and research—my academic witness, as it were—based on boundaries that weren’t my idea and sometimes don’t exactly fit with my version of academic utopia. But they’re there, and in my experience it’s a lot more efficient to work within the system than to try to remake it in our own images. In English, the central concept is that of the organizing discourse, a sort of intellectual worldview that influences and sometimes fully determines a given scholar’s choice of subject matter, analytical approach, interests, and conclusions.
For example, studies within the discourse of postcolonialism—one of my undergrad focus areas and briefly a potential focus for my professional work—emphasize differences in race, power, and language, and posit an inherent antagonism between Western and non-Western authors, texts, philosophies, etc. A postcolonial scholar of Moby-Dick, then, might look at the representation of Queequeg and the other non-white characters, and consider what is at stake in Ahab’s using them to pursue his fiery hunt. Or, and this is probably more likely given contemporary disciplinary politics, perhaps the same scholar would consider the novel as itself a part of the Western academy, or of Melville studies, or of the Vast Right-Wing Dead White Male Conspiracy, or whatever. The point is that discourses such as postcolonialism—and I need hardly add that these are not necessarily steady or consistent categories—represent both a set of philosophical assumptions about literature and a method of analyzing it.
Given these structures, how would the “outrageous idea of a Christian literary studies,” to use Hal Bush’s phrase (itself, of course, adapted from George Marsden’s broader work) work as a critical organizing discourse? Though many individual Christians have strongly influenced literary theory—St. Augustine, Martin Luther, C.S. Lewis, Cleanth Brooks, Northrop Frye, and James Sire, just to name a few—with the possible exception of Lewis’ book An Experiment in Criticism no one has really tried to set up an explicitly Christian theory of literary study. Part of the problem is isolating a primary explanatory focus, the base (to borrow the language of my Marxist colleagues) which drives the superstructure of a given discourse. In feminism, for instance, everything comes back to gender; in Marxism, to class-driven ideology; and in ecocriticism, to the interplay between humans and their environment. But what does Christianity “come back to”? Yes, we can talk and write about religious expression or church history or even individual doctrines, given sufficient textual evidence. As I understand the Bible, though, the whole point of Christ’s sovereignty is that it’s not reducible to any of those things—as Kuyper puts it, and as we’ve all probably heard…several times in our respective Intervarsity tenures, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: 'Mine!'” So what we have, it seems, is not so much an organizing principle for Christian scholarship, one that we can identify, understand, or dissect, but an organizing Person, one who is rather fond of identifying, understanding, dissecting, convicting, and finally redeeming us.
In the face of this rather inconvenient truth, I would argue that though it is possible to identify Christian ways of reading and writing—and many scholars have done some great work along those lines already-- Christianity cannot function as the same type of totalizing discourse, as just one more “ism” in the already crowded and diverse leviathan of English studies. But my own responsibility as a Christian scholar of literature doesn’t evaporate there. Fortunately, neither do the opportunities for Christian work in literary studies. Hal Bush, for instance, has identified three potentially fruitful avenues for Christian scholarship in literature: historical criticism, cultural studies, and “a more urgent and potentially even more fruitful project, which is the production of a theory of culture itself.” Likewise, as Bush suggests earlier in the same essay, our work as Christian teachers of writing and literature, a role that will no doubt dominate my own career, should also be considered as part of the process.
This leads me to my second point: that literary studies, understood in the light of God’s sovereignty and call on our lives, must consider the English department (and the university in which it operates) as a mission field. By this, I do not only mean the direct evangelism, in the sense of personal testimony and “altar calls,” that is familiar to those of us in the Evangelical tradition. Certainly, in some settings this level of boldness may be ethically and professionally appropriate, but in my experience that’s not often the case in grad school. Rather, I have in mind a broader understanding of witness, one that establishes Christianity’s intellectual and personal legitimacy, along the lines of Jim Sire’s definition of apologetics: to “la[y] before the watching world such a winsome embodiment of the Christian faith that for any and all who are willing to observe there will be an intellectually and emotionally credible witness to its fundamental truth” (26).
Let me give an example to try to explain this concept of witness. This quarter, I have the privilege of teaching English 280, OSU’s Bible as Literature course: two mornings a week (though I’m not sure 7:30 classes really count as morning) I’m in charge of lecturing to about 35 students on the Bible, most recently on the book of Joshua. Now, though I haven’t explicitly said so in class, pretty much all of my students know I’m a Christian, and the perceptive ones—of which there are many this quarter, thank God—have probably also figured out some of my more specific theological and doctrinal stances. But I’m still an untenured instructor at a public university, and frankly it would be unethical for me to act as if I were a Sunday school teacher in the classroom. (Though, I will admit that it’s fun to joke with my Christian friends that OSU is paying me to lead a Bible study!) Accordingly, I’m limited in what I can say in ways that I wouldn’t be in a typical evangelistic setting. All the same, I can and should explain to my students how a given passage might work theologically or note how certain themes and techniques play out in Christian beliefs. And what’s more, my students, many of whom are Christians themselves, are perfectly free to make their own more direct witnessing claims, and I am free to refrain from shushing them at the first glimpse of absolute truth.
So when I say that my department is my mission field, I do so aware of the fact that an apologia, the term translated as “defense” or “answer” in I Peter 3:15, can take many different forms. In some subfields of English studies, Christianity-centered research is a rather natural development, even among scholars who aren’t believers themselves. For instance, studies about the Medieval and Renaissance periods—roughly from the 5th to the early 17th centuries—often include theological and religious contexts by necessity, as do studies of early American literature. Even in my own field of 19th-century American literature, Christian scholars are making progress: Roger Lundin and Hal Bush have recent books on Christianity in Emerson and Twain, respectively, and there’s been a fairly consistent interest in the religious contexts of Hawthorne’s and Melville’s fiction as well, which will be part of my dissertation’s focus. Other subfields, though, have far less Christian representation—they are, so to speak, the “unreached” in the discipline. So far, for instance, relatively little theoretical work on gender or race has been from an explicitly Christian perspective, and many Christian scholars, myself among them, aren’t quite sure how to handle recent theoretical emphases on postmodernism and poststructuralism. So yes, there’s still lots of work to do, and still lots of scholars to pray for, but the field as a whole isn’t quite as gloomy or hostile as it might seem from the outside.
Thus far, I’ve mainly focused on why Christianity can and ought to matter to literary scholars, as part of their specific disciplinary practices. However, I want to conclude tonight’s talk by asking a more generally applicable question: why should literature per se matter to the Christian? As I pointed out earlier, there are many Christian defenses of reading literature. At least potentially, it may edify us, instruct us, educate us, and let us get pleasurably lost in the “pied beauty” of human language: paw through any good anthology, and you’ll find quite a bit of what Hopkins labeled “All things counter, original, spare, [and] strange.” Part of the reason that many literary theorists and not a few literary artists have treated literature as a proxy or even replacement for religion, I think, is that both capture us (on the page as well as through the page) in all our messily familiar—and familiarly messy—humanity. Cleanth Brooks put it well:
Like religion, literature is suffused with terms that appeal to the human heart. The interpretation may be merely implicit in the work, as when a lyric poet meditates on a flower, or it may be quite explicit and circumstantial, as when a novelist traces the history of a family or a society. But whether implicit or explicit, slightly or massively detailed, the literary artist brings together events and observations and moods into a pattern which has its coherence of attitude. The poem or novel or play gives us—if we want to use polysyllabic terms—a value-structured experience (51).
More specifically, we have in the Bible an inescapable and authoritative anthology of ancient literature, one that surprises and challenges me every time I read it, whether I’m specifically reading for theological meaning or not. Upon encountering the Bible, one may object to it, snarl at it, argue with it, read into it, or live by it—but one may not simply pretend it never existed. For the Christian, of course, this effect is even greater, for we are not simply called to appreciate Scripture’s literary artistry and historical importance, but rather to submit our whole lives to it. Yet over and above the Bible’s astounding ethics, history, artistry, and so on, consider this: it does not simply use literature as a convenient vehicle for its truth claims, but further redeems literature, and with it human language. In it, the very Word of God, transmitted over thousands of years by dozens of people, is incarnated, and by that act of incarnation God makes language matter (and, I suppose, makes matter of language). And though no human book or human author can duplicate this incarnational miracle of inspiration, I am fully convinced that good literature, properly understood, can help point the way. Writing in 1885, Gerard Manley Hopkins asked in one poem “To what serves Mortal Beauty?” This was his answer: “See: it does this: keeps warm/ Men’s wit to the things that are”—and ultimately, he concludes, to “God’s better beauty, grace.”
Human language and human literature, like all creation, is fallen, and is “groaning together in the pains of childbirth,” waiting for the here-but-not-yet redemption of the Kingdom of God. And that redemptive process, ultimately, is what makes my job and my calling meaningful—7:30 classes and endless grading notwithstanding—and what I hope will animate my life and my witness as a Christian literary scholar. Thanks for your attention.
