The Imagination of Their Hearts: The Coming Apocalypse in Literary Studies

Abstract

Abstract: Literary theory has always been theology by other means, a claim borne out by this essay’s brief survey of modern theoretical approaches as points of view and as failed god’s-eye views. Like John’s Apocalypse, my alarming title is more hopeful than it sounds; for while humanistic literary study is indeed doomed to increased disintegration and irrelevance if it continues to be cut off from its roots in biblical exegesis, Christian aesthetics, and moral theology, the human heart always will have its reasons for making, telling, and interpreting poems and stories. Thus the likely institutional collapse of secular literary humanism over the next decade or two into a welter of competing propagandas will be the moment of revelation and rebirth, if Christian readers and critics are wise enough to reject the tyranny of the postmodern non serviam and get on with their proper business: being good servants of beauty and truth.