Love and Good Reasons: Postliberal Approaches to Christian Ethics and Literature

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Duke University Press, 14/01/2003 - 326 páginas
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.

 

Índice

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
Conscious Worth in Emma
83
4 Honor Faithfulness and Community in Anthony Trollopes The Warden and He Knew He Was Right
126
Henry James and The Portrait of a Lady
169
Stephen Crane and the Gospel of John
212
Postliberal Christian Scholarship An Engagement with Rorty and Stout
251
Notes
271
Bibliography
297
Index
307
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Fritz Oehlschlaeger is Professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is coeditor of Toward the Making of Thoreau’s Modern Reputation, coauthor of Articulating the Elephant Man: Joseph Merrick and His Interpreters, and editor of Old Southwest Humor from the Saint Louis Reveille, 18441850.

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