Wandering in Circles: Venichka's Journey of Redemption in
"Moskva-Petushki" examines the definition of redemption in
Venedikt Erofeev's Moskva-Petushki . By placing Erofeev's
poema in conversation ...with other travel narratives from
Russia and the West, the book explores the meaning of redemption
across societies and cultures, and how Erofeev creates a commentary
on the possibility of redemption in a broken political and social
system. Through this comparative approach to
Moskva-Petushki , this work offers a new reading of the
text as a journey of failed social and personal redemption.
Dostoevsky Brazier, P H
2018, 20181025, 2016, 2018-10-25
eBook
As a writer and prophet Dostoevsky was no academic theologian, yet his writings are deeply theological: his life, beliefs, even his epilepsy, all had a role in generating histheology and eschatology. ...Dostoevsky’s novels are riven with paradoxes, are deeply dialectical, and represent a criticism of religion, offered in the service of the gospel. In this task he presented a profound understanding and portrait of humanity. Dostoevsky’s novels chart the movement of the human into death: either the movement through paradox and Christlikeness into Christ’s cross (a soteriology often characterized by the apophatic negation and self-denial; what we may term ‘the Mark of Abel’) leading to salvation and resurrection; or, conversely, the movement of those who refuse Christ’s invitation to be redeemed, and continue to fall into a self-willed death and a selfgenerated hell (‘the Mark of Cain’). This eschatology becomes a theological axiom which he unceasingly warned people of in his mature works. Startlingly original, stripped of all religious pretence, Dostoevsky as a prophet forewarned of the politicized humanistic delusions of the twentieth century: a prophet crying out through the wilderness.
The Quest for Redemption: Central European Jewish Thought in Joseph Roth's Works by Rares Piloiu fills an important gap in Roth scholarship, placing Roth’s major works of fiction for the first time ...in the context of a generational interest in religious redemption among the Jewish intellectuals of Central Europe. In it, Piloiu argues that Roth’s challenging, often contradictory and ambivalent literary output is the result of an attempt to recast moral, political, and historical realities of an empirically observable world in a new, religiously transfigured reality through the medium of literature. This diegetic recasting of phenomenological encounters with the real is an expression of Roth’s belief that, since the self and the world are in a continuing state of crisis, issuing from their separation in modernity, a restoration of their unity is necessary to redeem the historical existence of individuals and communities alike. Piloiu notes, however, that Roth’s enterprise in this is not unique to his work, but rather is shared by an entire generation of Central European Jewish intellectuals. This generation, disillusioned by modernity’s excessive secularism, rationalism, and nationalism, sought a radical solution in the revival of mystical religious traditions—above all, in the Judaic idea of messianic redemption. Their use of the Chasidic notion of redemption was highly original in that it stripped the notion of its original theological meaning and applied it to the secular experience of reality. As a result, Roth’s quest for redemption is a quest for a salvation of the individual not outside, but within, history.
In one of his best-known poems, 'The Maori Jesus', James K. Baxter recounts the misadventures of the eponymous Christ figure in and around Wellington city. Although he walks on water and is clearly ...possessed of supernatural powers such as the ability to make the sun shine or the ground shake, he is also very much a social outsider and a victim of the forces of order. His twelve disciples are equally marginalised, drawn from the fringes of society and / or specifically represented as likely to be in conflict with organised religion: among them is a cleaner of toilets, joined by an unsuccessful call-girl 'who turned it up for nothing', a 'sad old quean', an alcoholic priest ‘going slowly mad’ and a housewife 'who had forgotten the Pill'.
...writers have, since Sidney, either not deemed the comparison too saucy or have liked it for its sauciness. ...they have employed the analogy in ways that suggest an almost universal applicability. ......even if we concede that there is some hint of hope in Atonement or elsewhere in McEwan's fiction, this analysis may help to account for why that hope is, as Bradley and Tate describe it, so delicate, fragile, skeptical, and carefully hedged, especially in the work of a writer who robustly and stridently proclaims his belief in science and "in moral values and in love and in the transcendence that we might experience in landscape or art or music or sculpture" (qtd. in Bradley 16). ...it may be that, as Frank Kermode suggests in his review, "The pleasure Atonement gives depends as much on our suspending belief as on our suspending disbelief," regardless of what we, or McEwan, for that matter, believe in.
The Devil’s Mousetrap approaches the thought of three colonial New England divines--Increase Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and Edward Taylor--from the perspective of literary theory. Author Linda Munk ...focuses on the background of these men’s ideas and on the sources from which they drew, both directly and indirectly, in framing their theology. She notes that the language used in the pulpit by Mather, Edwards, and Taylor is full of allusions to the Bible and Apocrypha, to Puritan treatises, and to post-biblical exegesis, Jewish and Christian. Munk proceeds to elucidate many allusions that have, for the most part, proved to be unclear to contemporary readers, in order to provide essential insights into the construction of Puritan theology.
Graham Greene's novel "The Heart of the Matter" is typically viewed as a "Catholic" novel, and understandably so. Scobie, the protagonist of the novel, is a Catholic convert. The role of his religion ...is an overarching theme in the text. As the story unfolds, he faces numerous moral obstacles that he attempts to surmount by adhering to his religious beliefs. However, a detailed examination of the work reveals that Scobie has tailored and customized his adopted religion to fit into his own generally skewed view of the world, in which his primary goal is preserving the happiness of those around him, despite the cost to himself.
But Enough About Me Mendelsohn, Daniel
The New Yorker,
01/2010, Letnik:
85, Številka:
46
Magazine Article
"Confessional memoirs have been irresistible to both writers and readers for a very long time, and, pretty much from the beginning, people have been complaining about the shallowness, the ...opportunism, the lying, the betrayals, the narcissism. This raises the question of just why the current spate of autobiography feels somehow different, somehow "worse" than ever before--more narcissistic and more disturbing in its implications. And it may well be that the answer lies not with the genre--which has, in fact, remained fairly consistent in its aims and its structure for the past millennium and a half or so--but with something that has shifted, profoundly, in the way we think about our selves and our relation to the world around us." (New Yorker) This article examines the history of memoirs and considers what their popularity tells us about ourselves.
