Listening for God : Malamud, O'Connor, Updike, & Morrison / Peter C. Brown.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brown, Peter C., 1942- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Malamud, Bernard.

O'Connor, Flannery.

Updike, John.

Morrison, Toni, 1931-2019.

Morrison, Toni.

Holy, The, in literature.

Holy, The.

Physical Description:

255 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Macon, Georgia : Mercer University Press, [2020]

Summary:

"We live in a secular age, where the world and its ways seem to indicate the absence of God. The testimony of ancient and latter-day prophets requires more faith (or credulity) than most of us can manage. Can we still find spiritual truths that will restore a sense of a higher meaning to our lives? For millennia, people have looked to literature, to scriptures, epics, poems, plays, novels, and films for insights into the human condition. In our increasingly rationalized world, some of these contemporary storytellers-like a Bernard Malamud, Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, or Toni Morrison-stretch their art to find new words for the sacred. The God for whom they listen is elusive, a mystery. Their stories and novels are not make-believe accounts of a supernatural Being. They are stories that dig beneath all the ordinary ways we try to justify our lives to uncover in them the traces of a transcending judgment that both exalts and humbles us. Their engrossing stories are not the moral parables or cunning plots they appear on the surface to be. Here, Peter Brown offers a highly interdisciplinary examination of these four authors who represent four different faith traditions within Judeo-Christianity: Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and syncretistic (blending Africanist creole beliefs with Catholicism). All subversive writers, they write in extraordinary ways to undermine their own stories and open us, their readers, to something more, something that transcends time and fate. The close reading this requires from us is part of the trick-and the pleasure. We will read them to listen for this elusive transcendence, a sacred mystery that rebukes both the atheist's weak humanism and the believer's naive supernaturalism"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: 1. Malamud's Imagined Jews

"Armistice"

"The Cost of Living"

"The First Seven Years"

"The Magic Barrel"

"The Lady of the Lake"

"Jewbird"

"The Silver Crown"

The Natural

Imagined Jews

2. O'Connor's Sacramental Freaks

"Revelation"

"Everything That Rises Must Converge"

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find"

Sacramental Freaks

3. Updike's Secular Puritans

Rabbit, Run

Rabbit Redux

Rabbit Is Rich

Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit Remembered

Secular Puritans

4. Morrison's Re-Membered Slaves

The Bluest Eye

Paradise

Re-membered Slaves

Philosophical Coda: Our Narrative Knowledge of the God of Good and Evil

The God of Science and Philosophy

The God of Testimony

Casting out the Idols

God as Creator

God as Ruler

God as Judge

Original Sin.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780881467680

0881467685

OCLC:

1182020535