Spiritual Autobiography Research Articles

Рецепция «Дневника» Джона Вулмена в романе Теодора Драйзера «Оплот»

The article discusses the reception of John Woolman's Journal (1774) in Theodore Dreiser's The Bulwark (1946). John Woolman was a prominent 18th-century Quaker minister and abolitionist, whose Journal, usually defined as a spiritual autobiography, is his most famous text. Since its first edition, The Journal has been highly acclaimed among American autobiography readers and critics. In 1939 it was reverently perused by Dreiser. Two decades earlier, in 1914-1920, the writer had produced drafts of his Quaker novel The Bulwark but had not completed this text, partly due to a certain ambivalence he felt toward the protagonist. The 1920s-1930s, meanwhile, were decades marked by Dreiser's arduous intellectual and spiritual search and extensive reading. Arguably, it was Dreiser's acquaintance with Woolman's Journal which played a transformative role in his decision to reshape The Bulwark. The novelist rejected the original satirical portrayal of the central character and expanded the timespan of the novel. The idea of Woolman's influence on The Bulwark has been maintained by several critics; however, it was mostly mentioned without much elaboration. G. Friedrich's article (1955) and D. Pizer's monograph (1976) have been the only studies to discuss the reception in more detail. This article corroborates Friedrich's and Pizer's findings and contributes to the associations established in prior scholarship. Besides, it endeavors to provide a classification of Woolman's reception indicators in The Bulwark. Comparative analysis of the two narratives reveals two aspects of Woolman's reception in The Bulwark. The first aspect is associated with The Journal introduced to the plot as a book that accompanies the characters throughout their lifetime and is perceived differently by them in different periods. The Bulwark contains four explicit references to The Journal. Whereas it is a “desk companion” for the protagonist, Solon Barnes, the younger generation tends to perceive The Journal as an irrelevant, outdated text. The novel's final chapters emphasize the significance of Woolman for the characters. The second aspect of reception appears to be manifested in the numerous associations between the figure of Solon Barnes and the Journal autobiographical hero, their relatedness being suggested by psychological similarities as well as the novel plotting. The article argues that The Bulwark contains at least nine allusions to The Journal. These allusions may be discovered (1) in the chapters narrating Woolman's and Barnes's early years, (2) in the depictions of their worldviews, (3) in the motif of “intuitive communication”, (4) in third-person self-reference used by the two characters in the final chapters. The article concludes that the “personal spiritual drama” of Solon Barnes is composed by Dreiser with a considerable number of direct and indirect allusions to Woolman's autobiography.

О символизме хрестоматийного стихотворения Т.С. Элиота

The paper examines in detail the history of the creation of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, as well as the methods of its research in Western and Russian literary studies. The author proposes to combine a careful reading of this text with the notion of this poem as a spiritual autobiography of Eliot, which has various dimensions: from personal, proper poetic to esoteric. Based on the analysis of the biography of the young Eliot, the poet's relationship with J. Verdenal, the history of the poem, the drafts, the final text, the title of the poem, the epigraph, the poem's place in the poet's work, Eliot's statements about “Prufrock” the paper identifies the parameters of the symbolism of this work, which, playing on Eliot's complex relationship with the inexpressible (having an ambivalent nature), extends to its composition (the relationship of “I” and “you”; the paradoxical nature of the ending), the system of images and motifs (Prufrock as a theatrical person, the opposition of the male and female world), the special sense of reminiscences from Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, the philosophy of creativity as a mystery (Prufrock as a poet, combination of eroticism and mysticism, the theme of sacred crime) and love (homoerotic theme), genre (elusiveness of genre, Faustian beginning in it), symbolism and esoterics (“Prufrock” as a Masonic text on initiation, on life as theatre). The author gave a special place to the concretization of ekphrases (Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Burne-Jones), the content of which confirms the thesis that the poem has a text in the text.

Beyond East and West: What ‘Ladder’ Did John Wu Use Towards This Goal? (Part Two)

John Wu Jingxiong (1899-1986) was a diplomat, scholar, and authority on international law. He was also a prominent Chinese Catholic convert. His spiritual autobiography Beyond East and West (1951) reminds us of the Confessiones of St. Augustine for its moving description of John Wu’s conversion to Catholicism in 1937 and his early years as a Catholic. The very title of Wu’s autobiography points to his spiritual ideal which let humanity go beyond cultural particularities (be they Western, Chinese, or other). John Wu found wisdom in China’s great traditions, i.e., Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism, pointing to their universal truths that come ultimately from, and are fulfilled in, Christ. The author of this contribution has searched for John Wu’s universal traits which go beyond any culture and calls them, metaphorically, a “ladder”. He has found a threefold ladder, i.e. that of the Christian faith, of human friendship and human and divine love, and that of natural law.

Religion in Enlightenment England: An Anthology of Sources, ed. Jayne Elizabeth Lewis.

<i>Religion in Enlightenment England: An Anthology of Sources</i>, ed. Jayne Elizabeth Lewis.

A Not-So-Zulu Zion: Healing and Belonging in Isaiah Shembe’s Nazaretha Church

Ideas about healing produced challenges to a sense of ethnic belonging as well as a ‘Zulu turn’ within Isaiah Shembe’s Nazaretha Church. This article traces Shembe’s evangelism prior to the emergence of the Nazaretha to show that his spiritual autobiography and earliest religious communities offered few indications of an ethnic framework for belonging. Instead, claims about healing helped to integrate Shembe as an outsider in Natal, South Africa, and led to the emergence of the Nazaretha as a new denomination. Nazaretha strategies for acquiring space to enact their healing mission pushed the congregation towards greater engagement with the resources of Zulu-ness in the 1910s and 1920s. At the same time, their healing mission encouraged them to welcome anyone who sought God’s healing. This led to sustained engagement with Indians in particular, some of whom attributed their restored health to Shembe and converted to the Nazaretha faith. Healing, then, drove complex – and seemingly contradictory – processes; using it as a lens more fully accounts for how Shembe himself and, later, members of the Nazaretha Church understood shifting parameters of belonging.

"Geen vlerke stut meer ...": Geselekteerde gedigte in Krog se mede-wete gelees as outobiografiese postsekulêre laatwerk

In Antjie Krog se bundel mede-wete verskyn 'n aantal gedigte waarin die ek-spreker se soeke na 'n nuwe soort spiritualiteit verwoord word en waarin die implisiete versugting na die eenheid van alle dinge voorkom. Die doel van hierdie artikel is om 'n teoretiese konsep aan die hand te doen waarvolgens die spirituele aspekte in hierdie bundel bespreek kan word. Teorieë oor outobiografie as spirituele praktyk, veral in die digter se laatwerk, sowel as postsekularisme en ekopsigologie sal vir hierdie doel ingespan word. Daar sal hoofsaaklik eksemplaries te werk gegaan word deurdat enkele kerngedigte in die bundel ontleed word, te wete "moniaal", " 'n eland staan by 'n kuil", "ongelowig is nie die regte woord nie" en "kerssonnet". Daar word aangetoon op welke wyse Krog kategorieë of gehele wat in moderne tye hulle relevansie verloor het, poëties nuut verwoord deur te fokus op die verbeelding van 'n groter geheel waarin plante, diere en mense interverbonde is en interafhanklik van mekaar bestaan. Sodoende word die grense van die paradigma van egosentrisme waarin moderne mense verval het, opgehef en bestaande religieuse grense word deurbreek deurdat holisme op kreatiewe wyse as nuwe werklikheid daargestel word.

Aspects of political theology in Thomas Merton’s spiritual autobiography

An important personality of the Catholic space of the 20th century and, at the same time, of the ecumenical and the inter-religious, Thomas Merton (1915–1968) is one of the most important authors of spiritual autobiographies in the Christian space. Knowing this and the fact that from other points of view, his work has been investigated by different researchers from all around the world, we will try to present the aspects of the political theology which can be found in works such as: The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), The Sign of Jonas (1953), among others, which he wrote and which contain passages of spiritual autobiographies. These works emphasise aspects such as his attitude towards racism (a problem which he encountered in the America of the 1960s), war or Communism (because of the fact that before he studied at Columbia University, but also during this period, he also sympathised with the Communists). The author will therefore try to present some practical aspects of his works, and show how they can be used to create bridges between society and church; the answer he gives to the challenges of his time.Contribution: The article presents the main aspects of political theology which can be found in Merton’s work and shows how keywords such as war, racism or Communism have been seen by him and the views he has of a potential attitude of the Church towards them.

The poor and their image in the spiritual autobiographies of the Christian space of the 19th and 20th centuries

In this research, we will present the way how the poor and their image is reflected in the spiritual autobiographies from the Christian space from the 19th and 20th centuries. Saint Silouane the Athonite, Saint John of Kronstadt together with Faustina Kowalska, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, or other authors will be our sources from the Orthodox and Catholic space, while from the protestant area we will not neglect works like Dag Hammarskj old's one. We will try therefore to bring into attention a topic that has not been enough valorised by the contemporary research, has relevance for spiritual health, and constitutes an actual subject of discussion.

„O cierniu który rozdziera nasze oczy usta teraz i w godzinie śmierci”. What and what is it about Matka odchodzi by Tadeusz Różewicza?

The article is an attempt to defi ne the subject and genre of the book Matka odchodzi (2000), ascribed to Tadeusz Różewicz. Its authorship and composition, including the role of photographs, are analysed, as is the effect of transferring previously published poems and prose pieces to a new context. The book might be described as a spiritual autobiography (confession) with elements of witness and of challenge to the reader, as in Małgorzata Czermińska’s work on autobiographical writing; but other possible defi nitions are also considered, including two of Różewicz’s own rather surprising suggestions: a beggar’s threnody, a little book that is a prayer. The Marian piety of Stefania Różewicz is seen to infl uence even unconsciously her supposedly „godless” son’s way of seeing the world.

Re-membering the Body: Transferred Anamnesis in John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding

Abstract: John Bunyan’s 1666 spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners , attempts to fill a semiotic void at the heart of Reformed theology by transferring the understanding of bodily “remembrance” (or, in the Platonic and Scriptural traditions, “anamnesis”) from the Catholic Eucharist, transubstantiated and consumed, to the vivid corporeal response that, in Bunyan, comes from remembering Scripture. This essay argues that the intensely bodily language with which Bunyan describes his everyday recollections of Scripture is an idiosyncratic response to a crisis in signification for Protestants. Peter Goldman identifies in Bunyan a concern with “literary iconoclasm” that “led, ironically, to metaphorical language”; this essay contends that such language in Grace Abounding stems instead from Bunyan’s concern with corporeal refashioning, and that its primary motive is the relocation of remembrance in religious practice.

트럼프의 ‘위대한 미국’과 조지 플로이드 사건을 읽는 하나의 방법: 『로빈슨 크루소』의 섭리론과 식민주의

The former U. S. President Donald Trump’s well-known motto, “Make America Great Again,” while invoking the authority of America’s Manifest Destiny, works as a rallying cry for American Exceptionalism. With such conservative nationalism, Trump poses himself as a bastion of Christianity and law, whose rightful enforcement is exemplified by the brutal military suppression of the Black Lives Matter Movement nationwide. To trace back to the origin of how Trump’s Evangelical rhetoric serves to legitimize American Exceptionalism and institutionalized racism, this paper revisits one of the eighteenth-century Protestant spiritual autobiographies and overseas colonial adventure stories, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Just as Trump turns to the Evangelical mission for the jingoistic self-definition of who Americans are, Defoe’s classical work reappropriates Protestant Providentialism in order to flesh out England’s nascent imperial ideals. Trump’s exceptionalism resuscitates the America’s by masquerading it as the accepted norms of American democracy. In a very similar vein, Defoe’s narrator deviates from the conventional structure of tensions intrinsic to Spiritual Autobiography and Early Modern adventure narratives, the conflicts between free will and God’s ways, original sin and redemption, colonialism and cannibalistic threat. Crusoe ultimately tilts the balance in favor of his egocentric construal of Providence and unabashedly cracks the mysteries of divine will in order to justify his imperial desire and British Exceptionalism. Crucial to Crusoe’s egoistic turn, this paper argues, is the role of Friday, whose voluntary and willing embracement of Crusoe’s cultural imperialism frees the protagonist from the ethical burdens of such a unilateral exceptionalism.

Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson. By Marianne Noble

Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson. By Marianne Noble

“A Handful of Loose Beads”

Amy Coté, “‘A Handful of Loose Beads’: Catholicism and the Fictional Autobiography in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette” (pp. 473–494) This essay considers the influence of confession as a Catholic liturgical sacrament and as a literary genre informing the fictional autobiography in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853). In her earlier novel Jane Eyre (1847), Brontë used the tradition of Protestant spiritual autobiography as a literary genre focused on the individual’s spiritual development. Villette, written as it was at the height of a wave of anti-Catholic sentiment in England in the 1840s and 1850s, has understandably been read as a nationalistic rebuke of Catholicism. This essay complicates this narrative, and shows how Brontë looks to Catholic liturgical traditions, most notably the sacrament of confession, to trouble the generic conventions of the Protestant spiritual autobiography and, by extension, of fictional autobiography.

Spiritual autobiographies as sources of the ecumenism: Dag Hammarskjöld’s case

An important genre of the theological area, spiritual autobiography is currently undergoing a rediscovery process, because of recent research on this topic. Written by important mystical personalities belonging to different Christian traditions (such as Saint Silouane the Athonite or Saint John of Kronstadt for the Orthodox area, Saint Teresa of Avila for the Catholic one and Dag Hammarskjold for the Lutheran one), spiritual autobiographies can constitute a valuable source for the understanding of their authors’ thinking and perception of fundamental topics such as ecumenism. Being aware of this aspect, we will start from a case study, namely that of Dag Hammarskjold, and we will try to see how this category of texts can be used in order to understand the attitude of the authors of spiritual autobiographies and their motivation in the ecumenical space. Contribution: The research helps the reader to see how the spiritual autobiographies can be a source of understanding the ecumenism of mystical vocations, using as example Dag Hammarskjold’s Markings .

Вера и личность в меняющемся обществе: Автобиографика и православие в России конца XVII – начала XX века ed. by Лори Манчестер и Д. А. Сдвижкова

Reviewed by: Вера и личность в меняющемся обществе: Автобиографика и православие в России конца XVII – начала XX века ed. by Лори Манчестер и Д. А. Сдвижкова Sebastian Rimestad (bio) Вера и личность в меняющемся обществе: Автобиографика и православие в России конца XVII – начала XX века / под редакцией Лори Манчестер и Д. А. Сдвижкова. Москва: Новоелитературное обозрение, 2019. 408с., ил. Библиография. ISBN: 978-54448-1138-2. This book is an outcome of a larger research project at the German Historical Institute (DHI) in Moscow, which focused on religious autobiography. The edited volume comprises fifteen chapters penned by Russian and foreign scholars, covering the entire scope of Russian religious autobiography, at least from a historian's point of view. All the chapters very concisely relate to the volume's topic, making the book a prime introduction to the subject for the Russian-language audience. The value of such an introduction is only enhanced by the fact that different academic cultures – English, German, and Russian – fuse to create a comprehensive picture that incorporates the perspectives from both the inside and the outside. As Denis Sdvizhkov and Laurie Manchester remind readers in the introduction to the volume, the first manifestation of the modern self in Russian culture is usually attributed to Archpriest Avvakum's autobiography written after 1670. However, the notions of a "modern self" or "spiritual autobiography" are not easily translatable to the Russian context since they are intricately linked to Protestant conceptions of individuality and religious discipline. In the nineteenth century, the Slavophiles claimed that one of the main virtues of Orthodox Christianity was its "impersonality" and rejection of "individuality" as a value. Not surprisingly, the development of a modern religious self within the Russian Orthodox tradition has not received as much scholarly attention as it deserves. It is this lacuna that the book under review seeks to fill by providing an extensive overview of the development of religious individuality in imperial Russia through autobiographical texts – including diaries, letters, sermons, and so forth. The volume's authors focus not only on the clerical estate but also on the nobility, merchants, and peasants. Arranged in chronological order and divided into three uneven parts, fifteen chapters follow the introductory essay written by the editors, which outlines a peculiar trajectory of autobiography as a genre in post-Petrine Russia. Seven chapters form part 1, "From the Early Modern Period to the Nineteenth Century." The very short first chapter by Tatiana Sochiva reconstructs the formation of individual subjectivity [End Page 279] in early modern Russian literature on the example of one of Archpriest Avvakum's texts. She criticizes the widespread assumption that in his writings, Avvakum had sacralized his self, pointing out that this would have contradicted his Christian beliefs. Rather, Avvakum perceived reality around him in biblical terms, seeing everywhere the signs of the apocalypse. The following chapter by Sdvizhkov traces the parallel process of the rise of new religiosity and the new subjectivity in pre-Reform Russia. Unlike in the West, where the religious self was by and large a product of reformation theology emphasizing individual piety, in Russia, "it emerged because of a crisis in religious consciousness, through religious dissent, the establishment of a secular world and the need to situate oneself within it" (P. 31). Spiritual autobiography helped draw the boundaries between immanent and transcendent, worldly and sacral, and secular and religious. According to Sdvizhkov, the new genre envisioned four main narrative strategies: hagiography (lives of saints), life as confession, life as book, and, in the nineteenth century, life as journey. The budding literary genre was further stimulated by the availability of earlier Western European spiritual autobiographies, which were widely read in Russia. By the early twentieth century, autobiographical writing already involved all parts of society. The next three chapters by Gary Marker, Olga Tsapina, and Aleksandr Feofanov, each focus on eighteenth-century religious egodocuments, which originated in different layers of society – respectively, among the monks, white clergy, and nobility. The autobiographical texts cited by these authors reveal hesitant attempts to frame a sense of self within the normative religious discourse, while at the same time accentuating one's individuality. This is especially apparent in Marker's chapter on monastic literature, a literature consisting primarily of texts tightly regulated by the established canon, leaving little room for individuality. Monks could use some discretion only in the foreword and afterword to a religious text or by adding insertions and visual marks. For most of the available sources the monastic religious...

МУЗЫКАЛЬНАЯ КОНЦЕПЦИЯ РОМАНА Б.Л. ПАСТЕРНАКА «ДОКТОР ЖИВАГО» В КОНТЕКСТЕ ЖАНРА ДУХОВНОЙ АВТОБИОГРАФИИ

The purpose of the article is to study the role of the musical imperative in the modernization, transformation of the spiritual autobiography genre in the novel by B.L Pasternak Doctor Zhivago. To achieve this goal, the following tasks are required: a brief overview of biographical facts of the writer’s life, illustrating the path of his aesthetic philosophy and worldview, artistic formation, in which music played a dominant role; to study the musical imperative at the ideological-philosophical, system-structural, and aesthetic-artistic levels. While researching, biographical, systemic, structural, and hermeneutic methods were used. One of the culminating pages in the biography of Pasternak, the content of which had influenced Pasternak’s creative world, would be the day when he heard the sounds of musical improvisation on the piano by Skryabin, who was creating Divine poem. The sounds of music had merged with reality, the voice of nature, becoming a single whole with it. With a transforming and creative effort of memory, impressions coming from childhood would be built into the figurative-conceptual chain of his worldview “Life − music − creativity – poetry”, in which “music and poetry speak the same language of art”. All the creative heritage of B.L. Pasternak, including the final work − the novel Doctor Zhivago, which is represented as a kind of spiritual autobiography, both personal and the entire generation, respectively, serves as a generalization of the historical, philosophical, aesthetic and artistic paths of the Silver Age, a part of which was the author himself. Merging with its voice, and at the same time absorbing it into himself, he became a generalized representation of his generation portrait. In Doctor Zhivago, music appears at the level of mentions, quotations, and various sound images throughout the text. Their main ideological and semantic content is summed up by the words of Vedenyapin, in which Music is the equivalent of Truth, a “divine voice”, “raising above the animal and carrying it upward”, giving an inner impetus to the personality to move along the path of history to eternity. Research results. The ideological and philosophical setting of the musical novel organization is the idea of Music as a metaphor of the Artist-Christ, the embodiment of eternity, the path and a new history established by the sacrifice of Christ, leading to the human spirit. Accordingly, the theme of the path in spiritual autobiography as an ascent from the carnal to the spiritual level of consciousness, the attainment of eternity is reflected in the musical key as a progress of progress towards music and “melodization” of the spiritual path. At the systemic and structural level, the musical imperative is built in the form of a counterpoint principle substantiated by B.M. Gasparov, and the complex tiered hierarchical organization of the novel, in which all levels (individual, socio-historical, eternal) gravitate towards a single value center − the Artist-Christ − and merge in symphonic polyphony in unison. At the aesthetic and artistic level, this is achieved through the lyricization of the narrative, rhythmic insertions that “illuminate” the prose part, like the “voice of eternity”, repetitions, dividing the narrative into prose and lyrics as a form of music (the earthly path and eternity as its finale and the achievement of completeness existence) and, most importantly, building an acoustic space, contributing to the creation of a suggestive effect of “audibility” of the text. The acoustic space is built thanks to the presence of numerous sound images, the melodiousness and rhythm of the prose part, inserts from sacred texts and church chants, the attraction of Chopin`s techniques and motives, as well as the motive of distant sound as a timeless messenger of apocalyptic “future”.

Beyond East and West by John C. H. Wu

Reviewed by: Beyond East and West by John C. H. Wu Zhixi Wang Beyond East and West. By John C. H. Wu. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 2018. Pp. xxv, 384. $27.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-268-10366-8.) Over the recent decades, while there has been a growing interest in the history of Chinese Catholicism, particularly in Late Ming and Early Qing, not enough scholarly attention in the English-speaking world has been given to Chinese Catholic elites in the twentieth century. Limited treatments include an edited book by Ruth Hayhoe and Lu Yongling on Ma Xiangbo (1840–1939), who founded the Jesuit Aurora University in Shanghai in 1903, and Ernest Brandewie contributed to a monograph in 2007 on Bishop Thomas Tian Gengxi (Tien Keng-hsin), S.V.D. (1890–1967), and Paul P. Mariani in 2011 on Bishop Ignatius Gong Pinmei (Kung Pinmei) (1901–2000). Given the scarcity of the academic outputs in the field, Chinese Catholic elites’ autobiographies, such as John C. H. Wu’s (Wu Jingxiong, 1899–1986) Beyond East and West, would be indispensable for us to hear Chinese Catholics’ authentic voices in a turbulent century. Originally published by Sheed and Ward—a Catholic publishing house—back in 1951 and republished by University of Notre Dame Press in 2018, Beyond East and West may be considered the only one of its kind in terms of not only the original language—English—this Chinese Catholic author used for writing but also the multiple identities he owned: Protestant-turned Catholic, professor of law, judge, lawyer, scholar (of jurisprudence, Chinese philosophy, literature, and religious studies), official of the Nationalist central government in the Republic of China, Minister Plenipotentiary of the Republic of China to the Vatican (1947–49), friend of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States), Oriental philosophical mentor to—and correspondence partner of— Thomas Merton (one of the most well-known Catholic writers of the twentieth [End Page 152] century), and a father of thirteen children. Wu was also known as the “Chinese [G. K.] Chesterton,” and this spiritual autobiography can be well named, this reviewer claims, as the Chinese Augustinian Confessions. While it consists of, as in the original edition, “A Note of Introduction” by the Catholic writer Francis Joseph Sheed (Sheed and Ward was named after him and his wife Maisie Ward), two main parts with twenty-one chapters plus a Prologue and an Epilogue, and Wu’s Explanations and Acknowledgments, this new edition also includes both a long, helpful Foreword by John Wu, Jr. (one of Wu’s sons), and an additional chapter, “European Reminiscences,” that was left out in the original edition for reasons of space. The book is arranged chronologically. It starts from the stories of Wu’s birth, childhood, earlier formative education, and marriage in Ningbo city around the turn of the twentieth century through the early Republican period (Chapters 1–6), before turning to his conversion to Methodism in 1917 during his studying at the Comparative Law School (at Shanghai) of the Methodist Soochow University (Chapter 7). As the narrative progresses, the reader will then follow him to the Michigan Law School at Ann Arbor and later to the University of Paris in the early 1920s (Chapters 8–9). Upon his return to China in the mid-1920s, Wu became a law professor in his Alma Mater, before being appointed a judge in the newly born “Shanghai Provisional Court” and then becoming a lawyer in the 1930s (Chapters 10–11). Wu’s almost two decades of drifting away from the Christian faith since his American period ended up converting to Catholicism in the winter of 1937 immediately following the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War (Chapters 12–15). The rest of the book then recounts his wartime and postwar experiences, religious and secular, in Hong Kong, Guilin, Chongqing, Shanghai, the Vatican City, and other more cities across Europe, up until the year 1949 when the Communist took over China (Chapters 16–21). Wu’s life was entangled between the East and the West, Chinese religions and Western Protestantism/Catholicism, the secular and the religious, the material and the spiritual...

Till We Have Faces as Spiritual Autobiography

Till We Have Faces as Spiritual Autobiography

Parallel Suites: For The Re-Recognition of Innate Form

A serial poem in 11 numbered sections, "Parallel Suites: For the Re-Recognition of Innate Form” meditates on the intricate tensions among linguistic representation, phenomenological awareness and subjectivity. Drawing on Mayan myth, gnosticism and elements of spiritual autobiography, the poem charts the still points between awakening and understanding, memory and forgetting, to render a world both inchoate and charged with imminent meaning.

Heaven's Interpreters: Women Writers and Religious Agency in Nineteenth-Century America by Ashley Reed

Reviewed by: Heaven's Interpreters: Women Writers and Religious Agency in Nineteenth-Century America by Ashley Reed Ashley C. Barnes REED, ASHLEY. Heaven's Interpreters: Women Writers and Religious Agency in Nineteenth-Century America. Cornell, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. 262 pp. $19.95 paperback; open access e-book. Over the past two decades, literary criticism has situated itself as a post-secular discipline by negotiating between disenchantment and re-enchantment. Some critics have urged us to question the value of secular skepticism and to rediscover the pleasures of enchantment: to cease digging down and standing back (Rita Felski), to read reparatively (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick), to embrace vibrant matter (Jane Bennett). Meanwhile, disenchantment has pursued a complementary path, deconstructing secularism as modernity's most pernicious form of mystification. Think of Bruno Latour's claim that moderns worship facts as their own preferred fetishes, or Talal Asad's argument that secularist claims of liberal pluralism simply offer a cover for Western imperialism. Ashley Reed works both sides of the case. Her book is in part a skeptical exposure of secularism as a program that domesticated women and religion to free the public sphere for male-dominated market capitalism. Her book could also be seen as pursuing the enchantment of the material world, arguing as it does for women's power to invest matter, including their own bodies, with spiritual meaning. But Reed walks a productive line between debunking the allure of disenchantment and promoting the value of re-enchantment. She seeks out the "excluded middle" occupied by persons for whom "the impossibility of total self-determination is in many ways simply a fact, an everyday occurrence" (23). The women writers who occupy this middle ground marshal the resources of theology and of the novel to imagine alternate ways of exercising their will. Reed's balance of generosity and skepticism makes a potent case for the value of this novelistic theologizing. Her book's fundamental goal is to define agency as a viable, non-secular contrast to autonomy. In the process of correcting our secular prejudices about agency, Reed's book also aims to revise literary critical reading methods. Women's religious agency offers Reed a fulcrum for the critique of the secular self, because secularism built its autonomous ideal against a caricature of believing women: at the mercy of their emotions and bodies, irrational and incapable of free choice. Secularism wants us to believe in the autonomous self as "enlightened and free from supernatural coercion" (22). Agency, by contrast, can circulate and empower multiple persons in a community. Agency does not require, as autonomy often does, escape from tradition. Agency can "[adapt] to the power structures within which one lives" (19). The women who write the narratives that Reed examines, and the characters portrayed in those narratives, are neither passive believers nor lone wolves. They are busy making meaning for themselves and others. [End Page 321] There is, for example, the agency exercised in the speech acts that we see in Catherine Maria Sedgwick's The Linwoods. Such speech changes minds and political affiliations, and it is grounded in faith, specifically a recasting of Christ as a salvific preacher rather than a sacrificial atonement. Likewise, in writing Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs accesses agency through, not despite, religious faith. If we read Linda Brent's story as a spiritual autobiography akin to Nat Turner's and Jarena Lee's, Reed argues, then we see Brent claiming authority to speak by virtue of her battle against sin, calling on God as her judge and on readers as silent witnesses to her testimony. Brent claims interpretive authority when she counters Dr. Flint's reading of the Bible with her own. Both the authors and the women in these texts are themselves "heaven's interpreters," in the phrase of Reed's title. Representation and interpretation are the ways they exercise agency. Perhaps because that exercise lies so close to critics' own professional activity, and because we have long defined our professional activity as secular, we are liable to interpret in favor of the secular ideal of autonomy. But, Reed argues, it is time that we reform that liability. In...