Shakespeare, Lee Oser argues, is a Christian literary artist who
criticizes and challenges Christians, but who does so on Christian
grounds. Stressing Shakespeare's theological sensitivity, Oser
...places Shakespeare's work in the "radical middle," the dialectical
opening between the sacred and the secular where great writing can
flourish. According to Oser, the radical middle was and remains a
site of cultural originality, as expressed through mimetic works of
art intended for a catholic (small "c") audience. It describes the
conceptual space where Shakespeare was free to engage theological
questions, and where his Christian skepticism could serve his
literary purposes. Oser reviews the rival cases for a Protestant
Shakespeare and for a Catholic Shakespeare, but leaves the issue
open, focusing, instead, on how Shakespeare exploits artistic
resources that are specific to Christianity, including the
classical-Christian rhetorical tradition. The scope of the book
ranges from an introductory survey of the critical field as it now
stands, to individual chapters on A Midsummer Night's Dream,
The Merchant of Venice, the Henriad, Hamlet , and King
Lear . Writing with a deep sense of literary history, Oser
holds that mainstream literary criticism has created a false
picture of Shakespeare by secularizing him and misconstruing the
nature of his art. Through careful study of the plays, Oser
recovers a Shakespeare who is less vulnerable to the winds of
academic and political fashion, and who is a friend to the enduring
project of humanistic education. Christian Humanism in Shakespeare:
A Study in Religion and Literature is both eminently readable and a
work of consequence.
What was the ethical perspective of modernist literature? How did Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Beckett represent ethical issues and develop their moral ideas? Lee Oser argues that thinking about ...human nature restores a perspective on modernist literature that has been lost. He offers detailed discussions of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics to illuminate close readings of major modernist texts. For Oser, the reception of Aristotle is crucial to the modernist moral project, which he defines as the effort to transform human nature through the use of art. Exploring the origins of that project, its success in modernism, its critical heirs, and its possible future, The Ethics of Modernism brings a fresh perspective on modernist literature and its interaction with ethical strands of philosophy. It offers many new insights to scholars of twentieth-century literature as well as intellectual historians.
Unriddling the textual history "The Dark Tower" ranks among the high challenges in Lewis studies. Here, Oser presents new evidence that does not contradict Jonathan Himes's well-informed hypothesis, ...that Lewis "worked on the story in stages between the late 30s and the mid 50s".
Dating “The Dark Tower” Oser, Lee
Mythlore,
03/2024, Letnik:
42, Številka:
2 (144)
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The compositional history of The Dark Tower is contested and complex, but newly discovered clues within the published work do not contradict Jonathan Himes’s well-informed hypothesis, that Lewis ...“worked on the story in stages between the late 30s and the mid 50s.”
Was Belfast native C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) a Christian humanist? I approach this question by revisiting Lewis's critique of Christian humanism in Erasmus, More, Swift, and others. This sets up a ...contrast between Lewis the critic and Lewis the satirist—I refer particularly to the vein of satire that surfaces in The Pilgrim's Regress and runs through The Screwtape Letters and That Hideous Strength . I show that Lewis the satirist is indebted to the very same Christian humanists whom he disparages elsewhere. While Lewis's relation to Christian humanism is rife with contradiction, it is nonetheless central to his achievement.
I argue that the Shakespeare of Hamlet was influenced by the debate between Erasmus and Luther on the question of free will. I approach this debate as a record of the tensions within Christian ...humanism and as a “conceptual source text” for Hamlet. I detect the debate’s resonances in the play’s thematic investigation of the will, as well as in how the playwright yokes together the conflicting worlds of literature and theology, humanism and reform. I hold that while Shakespeare deploys Erasmian strategies of ambiguity and silence with respect to the highest mysteries, he also assimilates Luther’s suspicion of the pretensions of consciousness.
The critique of English insularity that opens "Tradition and the Individual Talent" hinges on Eliot's wry preference for the critical habits of the French-a playful jab at English national pride that ...sets up the following observation: "we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism" (Complete Prose 2: 105). Curiously, a similar call for apperception is heard from the very English author of the Fifteen Sermons: when the mind reflects upon itself in the act of reasoning, it begins to be dissatisfied with the absence of order and method in the exercise, and attempts to analyze the various processes which take place during it, to refer one to another, and to discover the main principles on which they are conducted, as it might contemplate and investigate its faculty of memory or imagination. ...this solemn-sounding, quasi-hylomorphic mystery is the Eliotic equivalent of what Wallace Stevens calls a "supreme fiction." 7 For parallel phrasing and general relevance, one may compare Newman: "in a state of society such as ours, in which authority, prescription, tradition, habit, moral instinct, and the divine influences go for nothing, in which patience of thought, and depth and consistency of view, are scorned as subtle and scholastic, in which free discussion and fallible judgment are prized as the birthright of each individual..."
