George B. Handley

Look away! : the U.S. South in New World studies

Look Away! considers the U.S. South in relation to Latin America and the Caribbean. Given that some of the major characteristics that mark the South as exceptional within the United States--including the legacies of a plantation economy, slave trade, and military defeat--are common to most of the Americas, Look Away! points to postcolonial studies as perhaps the best perspective from which to comprehend the U.S. South. At the same time it shows how, as part of the United States, the South--both centre and margin, victor and defeated, and empire and colony--complicates ideas of the postcolonial. The twenty-two essays in this comparative, interdisciplinary collection rethink southern U.S. identity, race, and the differences and commonalities between the cultural productions and imagined communities of the U.S. South and Latin America. Look Away! presents work by respected scholars in comparative literature, American studies, and Latin American studies. The contributors analyze how writers--including the Martinican Edouard Glissant, Cuban-American Gustavo Perez Firmat, and Trinidad-born, British V. S. Naipaul--have engaged with the southern United States. They explore William Faulkners role in Latin American thought and consider his work in relation to that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges. Many essays re-examine major topics in southern U.S. culture--such as race, slavery, slave resistance, and the legacies of the past--through the lens of postcolonial theory and postmodern geography. Others discuss the South in relation to the U.S.-Mexico border. Throughout the volume, the contributors consistently re-conceptualize U.S. southern culture in a way that acknowledges its postcolonial status without diminishing its distinctiveness. Contributors: Jesse Aleman; Bob Brinkmeyer; Debra Cohen; Deborah N. Cohn; Michael Dash; Leigh Anne Duck; Wendy Faris; Earl Fitz; George Handley; Steve Hunsaker; Kirsten Silva Gruesz; Dane Johnson; Richard King; Jane Landers; John T. Matthews; Stephanie Merrim; Helen Oakley; Vincent Perez; John-Michael Rivera; Scott Romine; Jon Smith; Ilan Stavans; Philip Weinstein; Lois Parkinson Zamora

Reading and the Menardian Paradox in 3 Nephi

While scholars have given much attention to the differences between the Sermon on the Mount as it appears in the New Testament and as it appears in 3 Nephi in order to demonstrate what the Book of Mormon appears to restore, we have underdeveloped theoretical understandings of what it means to find moments of perfect coincidence between the two accounts. Using Jorge Luis Borges’s classic 1939 short story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” and Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics as illustrative points of comparison, this essay explores a theory of revelation that helps us to account for both revelation’s divine force as well as for the historicity of the reader’s imagination that brings revelation to bear on lived experience. Ultimately, the essay argues that the coincidence of language makes an implicit argument for revelation as

Laudato si’ and the Postsecularism of the Environmental Humanities

T homas Merton, the American intellectual turned Trappist monk, recounts in The Seven Storey Mountain that his conversion to Catholicism was triggered by reading an account of a sermon in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a novel that draws from Joyce’s own departure from the faith. Merton fully recognizes the oddness and paradox of such a reading, but there was something, he thinks, about Joyce’s fidelity to experience that allowed Joyce to transmit the consistency and force of the Catholic faith that then penetrated him as a reader. Merton writes: “There was something eminently satisfying in the thought that these Catholics knew what they believed, and knew what to teach, and all taught the same thing, and taught it with coordination and purpose and great effect. It was this that struck me first of all.”1 In his paradigmatic modernist text, Joyce argues for the truthfulness of art over and against the didacticism of a sermon, and yet, paradoxically, it is his artistic rendition of that sermon that converts a lover of literature and the arts to a life of Christian monasticism. This might be a strange case of novelistic bibliomancy or just a bad reading. At the very least, it signals that reading is far less linear than we ecocritics might hope. I say this because we carefully choose reading lists for our students that are intended as antidotes to environmental indifference, not to mention racism, sexism, or colonialism. And yet, to put it bluntly, we have as yet little evidence to suggest that reading “green” literature correlates to an ecological conversion and, even more importantly, to a reduction in carbon emissions. There is nothing wrong with the hope that reading might change a reader, but moral transformation through reading is indeed a hope, akin to the hope believers have in sacred texts, and not a positivist guarantee that we are what we read.

FAITH, SACRIFICE, AND THE EARTH'S GLORY IN TERRENCE MALICK'S THE TREE OF LIFE

Abstract:Terrence Malicks film The Tree of Life revisits many of the questions regarding a Christian theodicy. How, for example, can one reconcile the idea of providence or believe in the meaning of human suffering when life itself is subject to and even dependent on chance and violence? In order to sustain faith in providence in such a universe, Malick suggests that one must be willing to absorb the insults of accident and sacrifice the human drive to control and master ones own destiny. In his invocation of Job, his allusions to Dostoevskys The Brothers Karamazov, and his debt to Kierkegaard, Malick suggests that the recompense for this sacrifice is an intensification of appreciation for existence itself and for the spiritual value of biological and geological processes. In this way, the film offers an insightful ecotheology that makes earth more central to a Christian ethos.Abstract: Terrence Malicks film The Tree of Life revisits many of the questions regarding a Christian theodicy. How, for example, can one reconcile the idea of providence or believe in the meaning of human suffering when life itself is subject to and even dependent on chance and violence? In order to sustain faith in providence in such a universe, Malick suggests that one must be willing to absorb the insults of accident and sacrifice the human drive to control and master ones own destiny. In his invocation of Job, his allusions to Dostoevskys The Brothers Karamazov, and his debt to Kierkegaard, Malick suggests that the recompense for this sacrifice is an intensification of appreciation for existence itself and for the spiritual value of biological and geological processes. In this way, the film offers an insightful ecotheology that makes earth more central to a Christian ethos.