Emerging Scholars Blog

InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network

literature

Science Corner: Are You There, Molière?

(Photo by TGN1 )

Becoming a writer whose work is edited and posted in public has made me more aware of (and self-conscious about) my authorial idiosyncrasies; for example, I apparently use semicolons at an above average rate. I don’t want them to become the sort of overly familiar that breeds contempt, but I do find it somewhat satisfying that I can be known through my writing. If someone recognizes my quirks, then I’ve connected with that reader for good, ill, or otherwise. Writing quirks represent a pattern, and patterns can often be quantified and represented in ways that computer algorithms can recognize. And so it is that the plays attributed to Molière have been analyzed and found to be more like his other writing than like the writings of his contemporaries.
[Read more…] about Science Corner: Are You There, Molière?

In June or January: The Myth of Summertime (Summer Snapshot 2018)

We like to share what we call “snapshots” from time to time, brief reflections from a particular moment of the year in the life of an ESN author or member. We hope these glimpses of God’s work in the lives of fellow academics are encouraging to early career scholars as they navigate the calendar of the academic year and the everyday calling of following Christ in their work and lives. Today we share some thoughts on the end of summer by literature professor Angela O’Neal. You can read her previous posts here.  [Read more…] about In June or January: The Myth of Summertime (Summer Snapshot 2018)

Reimagining the Sacred & the Cool: A Literary Symposium (Highlighting Community)

 

Missing Books and Culture? Want to have awesome conversations about literature and faith? Wishing you could hang out in a cool Christian study center this spring? Our friends at Upper House, a Christian study center in Madison, Wisconsin, have a way to address all three of those longings. John Wilson of Books and Culture will be a panel moderator at Upper House’s literary symposium on April 7, an event designed to gather Christians across the region for thoughtful conversations in an amazing space. Browse the event description below, or go straight to the event website. 

Reimagining the Sacred & the Cool: A Literary Symposium at Upper House

Many have argued that the cultivation of a shared literary and moral imagination is vital in a flourishing democracy. And yet the study of literature, and the humanities at large, is no longer central in our educational institutions. While some blame pop-culture, a lack of funding, or technologies of distraction, others have looked within. In Lisa Ruddick’s groundbreaking essay, “When Nothing is Cool,” she argues that “decades of anti-humanist one-upmanship,” and a general “thrill of destruction,” have resulted in a sweeping malaise of suspicion that now defines academic discourse. “Nothing in English is ‘cool,’” she says, but “on the other hand, you could say that what is cool now is, simply, nothing.” Which begs the question, if nothing is cool, what can we celebrate, let alone enjoy?

In this one-day symposium, we will examine the landscape of a literary culture at the limits of hermeneutic suspicion. One path forward, according to philosopher Richard Kearney, would be to reimagine the sacred as a fundamental category of criticism, even for scholars and artists who do not think of themselves as explicitly religious. Looking to the work of 20th century atheists, agnostics, and apostates, like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust, Kearney illustrates how spiritual and moral impulses consistently inform the literary imagination. In a contemporary setting, the same impulses are voiced in the poetry of Fanny Howe, the late Mark Strand, and Adam Zagajewski, along with the novels of Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Don DeLillo, and Michel Houellebecq.

On April 7, 2017, we warmly welcome both Ruddick and Kearney, along with literary critic Jon Baskin, poet G.C. Waldrep, and editor John Wilson, to help us reimagine the sacred, and the cool, and reconsider the place of the literary imagination in our world today.

Communication for Communion, Part 3: Babel and Pentecost (Scholar’s Call)

C_DayofPentecost-mediumLast week’s post discussed the quest for the Adamic language in the early modern period, understood as a language in which words correspond exactly to the things they represent. This post is Part 3 of a series. See Part 2 here and Part 1 here.

But was there ever a language in which the totality of a thing in its essence was communicated fully in words? James K.A. Smith, a Christian philosopher at Calvin College, says no. In his book The Fall of Interpretation, Smith argues that human beings were never intended to grasp the totality of the world instantaneously and without mediation – that the need to engage the world through thoughts and signs that grasp the world only partially is not a consequence of our fallenness but of our finitude; that God creates us not to know everything in the way that he knows everything but continually to learn, to grow, and to discover in ways that are appropriate to our status as finite creatures.1 [Read more…] about Communication for Communion, Part 3: Babel and Pentecost (Scholar’s Call)

Communication for Communion, Part 2: The Quest for the Adamic Language (Scholar’s Call)

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David Parry continues his Scholar’s Call series on communication and language. See Part 1 here. 

Post 2: The quest for the Adamic language

So what language did Adam and Eve speak in the Garden of Eden? This was a question of significant interest in the early modern period (around the 16th and 17th centuries).1 The majority scholarly opinion, following Augustine, went with Hebrew.2 However, other options were available. For instance, Jan van Gorp argued in his 1569 work Origines Antwerpianae that the original language was Dutch, and, in particular, the dialect of Antwerp, since the ancestors of the burghers of Antwerp were not present at the Tower of Babel when the languages were confused.3 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer argued in 1641 that it must have been German, since German “speaks in the languages of nature, quite perceptibly expressing all its sounds”.4 The varied suggestions were parodied in a 1688 pamphlet by Andreas Kempe, Die Sprachen des Paradises (The Languages of Paradise), which proposes that God spoke Swedish, Adam spoke Danish, and the serpent spoke French. Some concluded that the original God-given language was lost at the Tower of Babel and so was no longer in existence.5 [Read more…] about Communication for Communion, Part 2: The Quest for the Adamic Language (Scholar’s Call)