Beyond the Story: American Literary Fiction and the Limits of Materialism
Christina Bieber Lake, "Beyond the Story: American Literary Fiction and the Limits of Materialism"
English | ISBN: 0268106258 | 2019 | 212 pages | EPUB | 3 MB
English | ISBN: 0268106258 | 2019 | 212 pages | EPUB | 3 MB
Beyond the Story: American Literary Fiction and the Limits of Materialism argues that theology is crucial to understanding the power of contemporary American stories. By drawing on the theories of M. M. Bakhtin, Christian personalism, and contemporary phenomenology, Lake argues that literary fiction activates an irreducibly personal intersubjectivity between author, reader, and characters. Stories depend on a dignity-granting valuation of the particular lives of ordinary people, which is best described as an act of love that mirrors the love of the divine. Through original readings of the fiction of Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Lydia Davis, Toni Morrison, and others, Lake enters into a dialogue with postsecular theory and cognitive literary studies to reveal the limits of sociobiology’s approach to culture. The result is a book that will remind readers how storytelling continually reaffirms the transcendent value of human beings in an inherently personal cosmos.
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