The Force of Tradition: Response and Resistance in Literature, Religion, and Cultural StudiesDonald G. Marshall Rowman & Littlefield, 2005 - 271 sider How do we stand in relation to everything that comes down to us from the past? Is the very idea of tradition still useful in the wake of historical ruptures, such as the Holocaust, changes in the canon, and the end of colonialism? The concept of tradition has gained renewed importance in recent cultural studies. Suspicion of tradition as culturally narrow and oppressive is a persistent theme of modernity and has increased lately with the resurgence of religious traditionalism around the globe. At the same time, various groups demanding recognition for their distinctive cultural identity have reclaimed their traditions. Philosophers from Josiah Royce and Hans-Georg Gadamer to Alasdair MacIntyre have explored the relations between tradition and themes such as freedom, community, self-assertion, originality, and the shared values and interpretations that constitute everyday life. The essays in this volume offer varying, even disparate analyses of religious, literary, and cultural traditions and both responses and resistance to them in a variety of philosophers, novelists, and theologians. They examine works by Gadamer, Royce, MacIntyre, Plato, Jacques Derrida, Charlotte Bronte, Søren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Edith Wharton, Chinua Achebe, John Fowles, Heinrich Böll, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Cotton Mather, Thomas Kuhn, Mikhail Bakhtin, Donald Davidson, Antebellum African-American women preachers, and Christian and Jewish thinkers in the wake of the Holocaust. |
Innhold
Tradition and the Terror of History Christianity the Holocaust and the Jewish Theological Dilemma | 19 |
Charity Militant Gadamer Davidson and Postcritical Hermeneutics | 39 |
In the Chorus of Others M M Bakhtins Sense of Tradition | 55 |
The Role of the Kuhnian Paradigm in Tradition and Originality | 79 |
Walking vs Flying Kierkegaard on Tradition and the Moral Import of Literature | 99 |
My Own Private New England Tradition the Self and the State in Cotton Mathers The Wonders of the Invisible World | 127 |
Holy Fire Biblical Radicalism in the Narratives of Jarena Lee and Zilpha Elaw | 143 |
ESTESE and Doblado Coleridge Blanco White and the Church of Rome | 165 |
Jane Eyre and the Tradition of SelfAssertion or Brontes Socialization of Schillers Play Aesthetic | 185 |
Tradition and Liberation A Critique of German Cultural Modernity in Heinrich Böll and HansGeorg Gadamer | 213 |
Community Text and Tradition in The French Lieutenants Woman | 237 |
Storytellers and Interpreters in Achebe | 255 |
About the Contributors | 269 |