- CC 325 AX - Theology & Literature
- 3 or 4 Credits
MWF 12:55 am-1:45 pm - Professor Upton
(Cross-listed with THEO 348X)
If theology in the most basic sense is language about God, this course will ask what kind of theology is done in writing and reading literature. The question is not an easy one to answer. The Christian tradition, after all, has a founding book, the Bible, and a whole range of authoritative creeds and theological treatises. “Fictions” would seem to be irrelevant, or perhaps even idolatrous. However, Christians have consistently found it necessary to understand and shape lives of faith through imaginative creativity: by writing novels, lyric poetry, epics, even tragedies. This course will therefore ask why Christians attempting to live out their tradition would resort to an engagement with literary genres. How do poets and novelists relate their own creativity and imaginative works to the sources of the Christian tradition? What type of religious reflection does literature, in distinction to other genres of writing, uniquely make possible? How does the form of a literary work shape the theological content of the tradition?
Among other things, literature enables us to imagine “others”: to imagine other human beings, other ways of living, or the Divine Other. It also enables us to view ourselves as “other,” as someone different than we thought we were, or as potentially different than we now are. This course will especially give attention to two forms of such imagination, lyric poetry and the novel (though it will examine others). The class will explore how lyric poetry has been used by poets not only to understand the new life occasioned by the experience of grace and conversion, but also to formulate or resist complex metaphors about God. Because of its focus on interior states, lyric poetry has also been used to depict the state of the soul that is waiting for God, imagining God’s presence in God’s seeming absence. The class will also explore the ability of narrative texts such as novels to imagine a variety of different worlds in which to live out the Christian story of sin and redemption. Narratives ask the question of whether and how the Christian faith tradition can be lived out, and lived out in the company of others, even non-Christians.
In all of these genres, the categories and images of faith are taken up again and again, re-imagined, and re-lived, even in the works of authors who would prefer to leave those categories and images behind. As such, they present challenges to readers, presenting alternative ways for us to view the Christian life, challenging us once again to engage critically with the tradition, making it our own.
Readings for the class may include lyric poetry by John Donne, George Herbert, John Milton, Christina Rossetti, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, and Denise Levertov. Novels may include works of C.S. Lewis, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Flannery O’Connor, James Joyce, and Shusako Endo. The course will culminate in a reading of Dante’s Purgatorio.
Requirements will include weekly critical assignments, two 3-4 page papers, one final 10-12 page paper, and an oral presentation based on the final paper.