Giles Gunn

The Interpretation of Otherness: Literature, Religion, and the American Imagination.

Studies the ways in which imaginative literature expresses religious meaning and considers the contribution of literary criticism to religious scholarship, maintaining that a reciprocity exists between literature and religion.

Who Are You Really, and What Were You Before?: Reflections on a Thinking Life

When Humphrey Bogart turns to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca and puts to her the question that forms the title of this essay asking in addition, ‘What did you do, and what did you think?’ she gently puts him off with the reminder, ‘We said no questions.’ Bergman’s refusal to answer does not mean that for her the past has no place in their relationship; indeed, the past will eventually determine the limits on where their relationship can go and what it can become. While Bergman has something she prefers to keep private, even though she has no reason at the time to believe that it will make any difference to Bogart (her marriage to the Paul Henreid character whom she now assumes is dead), the real reason for her reticence is that she, like the movie, believes that the only past that is important for Bogart to know anything about is the one out of whose traces in the present she hopes they can build a life together in the future. This is pretty much how the past will be treated here. The only past that will matter is the one that has influenced the intellectual formation of the present, which is to say the only past that, in its efforts to define itself, the present needs for the sake of its own narrativization. We tell stories out of the present for the sake of finding in the past elements for the emplotment of what, in effect, is a potentially meaningful future.

America and the misshaping of a new world order

The attempt by the George W. Bush administration to reshape world order, especially but not exclusively after September 11, 2001, increasingly appears to have resulted in a catastrophic “misshaping” of geopolitics in the wake of bungled campaigns in the Middle East and their many reverberations worldwide. Journalists and scholars are now trying to understand what happened, and this volume explores the role of culture and rhetoric in this process of geopolitical transformation. What difference do cultural concepts and values make to the cognitive and emotional weather of which, at various levels, international politics is both consequence and perceived corrective? The distinguished scholars in this multidisciplinary volume bring the tools of cultural analysis to the profound ongoing debate about how geopolitics is mapped and what determines its governance. The volume includes essays by Eileen Boris, Richard Falk, Giles Gunn, Mark Juergensmeyer, Lisa Lowe, Simon Ortiz, David Palumbo-Liu, Lisa Parks, Donald Pease, Wade Clark Roof, John Carlos Rowe, Gabriele Schwab, and Ronald Steel.

The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture

This important new work is at once a provocative defence of the kind of moral reflection once associated in America with the writings of Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson and an acknowledgement that this pragmatic legacy must be revaluated in the light of challenges posed by structuralist and post-structuralist theory. Gunn challenges the assumptions of modern criticism with a revised interpretation of pragmatism and its critical legacy.

Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society.@@@Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism.

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