Narrative, religion, and science : fundamentalism versus irony, 1700-1999 / Stephen Prickett.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Prickett, Stephen, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Narration (Rhetoric)--History.

Narration (Rhetoric).

Literature and science.

Religion and literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (viii, 281 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Other Title:

Narrative, Religion & Science

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

An increasing number of contemporary scientists, philosophers and theologians downplay their professional authority and describe their work as simply 'telling stories about the world'. If this is so, Stephen Prickett argues, literary criticism can (and should) be applied to all these fields. Such new-found modesty is not necessarily postmodernist scepticism towards all grand narratives, but it often conceals a widespread confusion and naïvety about what 'telling stories', 'description' or 'narrative', actually involves. While postmodernists define 'narrative' in opposition to the experimental 'knowledge' of science (Lyotard), some scientists insist that science is itself story-telling (Gould); certain philosophers and theologians even see all knowledge simply as stories created by language (Rorty; Cupitt). Yet story telling is neither innocent nor empty-handed. Prickett argues that since the eighteenth century there have been only two possible ways of understanding the world: the fundamentalist, and the ironic.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: 1 Postmodernism, grand narratives and just-so stories

Postmodernism and grand narratives

Just-so stories

Narrative and irony

Language, culture and reality

2 Newton and Kissinger: Science as irony?

Said, Kissinger and Newton

Revolutions and paradigms

Models of reality

Ambiguity and irony

3 Learning to say 'I': Literature and subjectivity

Interior and exterior worlds

The idea of literature

The ideal of the fragment

Two kinds of truth?

4 Reconstructing religion: Fragmentation, typology

and symbolism

From religion to religions

Religions of nature and of the heart

Millenarian fragments and organic wholes

The aesthetics of irony: Keble and Rossetti

5 The ache in the missing limb: Language, truth and

presence

Coleridge: The language of the Bible

Newman: The physiognomy of development

Polanyi: The origins of meaning

Steiner, Derrida and Hart: Presence and absence

6 Twentieth-century fundamentalisms: Theology, truth

and irony

Rorty: Language and reality

Postmodernism and poetic language: Religion as aesthetics

Logos and logothete: Reading reality

7 Science and religion: Language, metaphor and

consilience

Etching with universal acid

Language as change

A rebirth of images

The fabric of the universe

Concluding conversational postscript: The tomb

of Napoleon.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Includes bibliographical references (p. 264-273) and index.

ISBN:

1-107-12527-8

1-280-41955-5

0-511-17630-9

0-511-04222-1

0-511-15708-8

0-511-32952-0

0-511-61345-8

0-511-04513-1

OCLC:

475916706