Research Catalog

Title

Listening for God : Malamud, O'Connor, Updike, & Morrison / Peter C. Brown.

Author

Brown, Peter C., 1942-

Publication

Macon, Georgia : Mercer University Press, [2020]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Subject

• Malamud, Bernard
• O'Connor, Flannery
• Updike, John
• Morrison, Toni, 1931-2019
• Holy, The, in literature
• Holy, The

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Machine generated contents note: 1. Malamud's Imagined Jews -- "Armistice" -- "The Cost of Living" -- "The First Seven Years" -- "The Magic Barrel" -- "The Lady of the Lake" -- "Jewbird" -- "The Silver Crown" -- The Natural -- Imagined Jews -- 2. O'Connor's Sacramental Freaks -- "Revelation" -- "Everything That Rises Must Converge" -- "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" -- Sacramental Freaks -- 3. Updike's Secular Puritans -- Rabbit, Run -- Rabbit Redux -- Rabbit Is Rich -- Rabbit at Rest -- Rabbit Remembered -- Secular Puritans -- 4. Morrison's Re-Membered Slaves -- The Bluest Eye -- Paradise -- Re-membered Slaves -- Philosophical Coda: Our Narrative Knowledge of the God of Good and Evil -- The God of Science and Philosophy -- The God of Testimony -- Casting out the Idols -- God as Creator -- God as Ruler -- God as Judge -- Original Sin.

Call Number

JFE 21-2399

ISBN

• 9780881467680
• 0881467685

LCCN

• 2020015005
• 40030345645

OCLC

1182020535

Author

Brown, Peter C., 1942- author.

Title

Listening for God : Malamud, O'Connor, Updike, & Morrison / Peter C. Brown.

Publisher

Macon, Georgia : Mercer University Press, [2020]

Description

255 pages ; 24 cm

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Summary

"We live in a secular age, where the world and its ways seem to indicate the absence of God. The testimony of ancient and latter-day prophets requires more faith (or credulity) than most of us can manage. Can we still find spiritual truths that will restore a sense of a higher meaning to our lives? For millennia, people have looked to literature, to scriptures, epics, poems, plays, novels, and films for insights into the human condition. In our increasingly rationalized world, some of these contemporary storytellers-like a Bernard Malamud, Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, or Toni Morrison-stretch their art to find new words for the sacred. The God for whom they listen is elusive, a mystery. Their stories and novels are not make-believe accounts of a supernatural Being. They are stories that dig beneath all the ordinary ways we try to justify our lives to uncover in them the traces of a transcending judgment that both exalts and humbles us. Their engrossing stories are not the moral parables or cunning plots they appear on the surface to be. Here, Peter Brown offers a highly interdisciplinary examination of these four authors who represent four different faith traditions within Judeo-Christianity: Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and syncretistic (blending Africanist creole beliefs with Catholicism). All subversive writers, they write in extraordinary ways to undermine their own stories and open us, their readers, to something more, something that transcends time and fate. The close reading this requires from us is part of the trick-and the pleasure. We will read them to listen for this elusive transcendence, a sacred mystery that rebukes both the atheist's weak humanism and the believer's naive supernaturalism"-- Provided by publisher.

Other Standard Identifier

40030345645

Research Call Number

JFE 21-2399