Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-t5pn6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-18T15:17:34.603Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Rituals of the Ordinary”: Marilynne Robinson's Aesthetics of Belief and Finitude

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Ray Horton
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Marilynne Robinson, the author of Housekeeping, Gilead, Home, and Lila, has garnered attention for her sustained engagement with religious themes. Yet for all its robust participation in the theology of a distinctively Calvinist Protestantism, Robinson's fiction is invested in religious forms that are less propositional than phenomenological. It imagines belief as both a perceptual background and a system of thought that activates concentrated aesthetic attention to quotidian moments of temporal contingency and worldly ephemerality. Consequently, Robinson's work intervenes in the burgeoning critical discourse surrounding religion and literature, offering an alternative to methodologies that prioritize the ontology of belief over the aesthetic modes of perception that belief makes available.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 132 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 119 - 134
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2017

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity Stanford UP, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caputo, John. On Religion. Routledge, 2001.Google Scholar
Caputo, John, and Keller, Catherine. “Theopoetic/Theopolitic.” CrossCurrents, Winter 2007, pp. 105–11. CrossCurrents, www.crosscurrents.org/Caputo0406.pdf.Google Scholar
Clune, Michael. Writing against Time. Stanford UP, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Douglas, Christopher. “Christian Multiculturalism and Unlearned History in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 44, no. 3, 2011, pp. 333–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edwards, Jonathan. “A Divine and Supernatural Light.” American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Warner, Michael, Library of America, 1999, pp. 325–46.Google Scholar
Fessenden, Tracy. “The Problem of the Postsecular.” American Literary History, vol. 26, no. 1, 2014, pp. 154–67. Project Muse, muse.jhu.edu/article/536914/pdf.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity. 1841. Translated by George Eliot, Harper and Brothers, 1957.Google Scholar
Haddox, Thomas F. Hard Sayings: The Rhetoric of Christian Orthodoxy in Late Modern Fiction. Ohio State UP, 2013.Google Scholar
Holberg, Jennifer L. “‘The Courage to See It’: Toward an Understanding of Glory.” Christianity and Literature, vol. 59, no. 2, 2010, pp. 283–300. Literary Reference Center, web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=3&sid=f8c1e226–3170–49cd-a14b-0e1794753dba%40sessionmgr102&hid=115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hungerford, Amy. Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960. Princeton UP, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackson, Gregory S. The Word and Its Witness: The Spiritualization of American Realism. U of Chicago P, 2009.Google Scholar
Kearney, Richard. Anatheism: Returning to God after God. Columbia UP, 2010.Google Scholar
Keefe-Perry, L. B. C. “Theopoetics: Process and Perspective.” Christianity and Literature, vol. 58, no. 4, 2009, pp. 579–601. Literary Reference Center, web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=6&sid=f8c1e226–3170–49cd-a14b-0e1794753dba%40sessionmgr102&hid=115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Latz, Andrew Brower. “Creation in the Fiction of Marilynne Robinson.” Literature and Theology, vol. 25, no. 3, 2011, pp. 283–96. OhioLINK, journals.ohiolink.edu/pg_99?109736196079069::NO::P99_ENTITY_ID,P99_ENTITY_TYPE:15910299,MAIN_FILE&cs=33R71j3lmPWZnMbgjD7Akwcrwd0B1dtKtfqTwyyLsrr9HF1HFGWCRzJrBbCk_lynHrpkxquw6VLSGCwqaNM1KTw.Google Scholar
Leise, Christopher. “‘That Little Incandescence’: Reading the Fragmentary and John Calvin in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 41, no. 3, 2009, pp. 348–67. Project Muse, muse.jhu.edu/article/377059/pdf.Google Scholar
Ludwig, Kathryn. “Postsecularism and a Prophetic Sensibility.” Christianity and Literature, vol. 58, no. 2, 2009, pp. 226–33. Literary Reference Center, web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=8&sid=f8c1e226–3170–49cd-a14b-0e1794753dba%40sessionmgr102&hid=115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mallon, Anne-Marie. “Sojourning Women: Homelessness and Transcendence in Housekeeping.” Critique, vol. 30, no. 2, 1989, pp. 95–105. EBSCOHost, web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=3&sid=47ed186f-7a15–41b7-b201–04daab702330%40sessionmgr4010&hid=4201.Google Scholar
McClure, John. Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison. U of Georgia P, 2007.Google Scholar
Painter, Rebecca M. “Loyalty Meets Prodigality: The Reality of Grace in Marilynne Robinson's Fiction.” Christianity and Literature, vol. 59, no. 2, 2010, pp. 321–40. Literary Reference Center, web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=10&sid=f8c1e226–3170–49cd-a14b-0e1794753dba%40sessionmgr102&hid=115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pecora, Vincent P. Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity. U of Chicago P, 2006.Google Scholar
Ricoeur, Paul. “Philosophy and Religious Language.” Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, edited by Wallace, Mark I. and translated by Pellauer, David, Fortress, 1995, pp. 35–47.Google Scholar
Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. Picador, 2004.Google Scholar
Robinson, Marilynne. Home. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.Google Scholar
Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. Picador, 1980.Google Scholar
Robinson, Marilynne. “Jonathan Edwards in a New Light: Remembered for Preaching Fire and Brimstone, He Was Actually One of the Great Intellectuals of His Era.” Humanities, vol. 35, no. 6, Nov.-Dec. 2014. The National Endowment for the Humanities, www.neh.gov/humanities/2014/novemberdecember/feature/jonathan-edwards-in-new-light-remembered-preaching-fire-and.Google Scholar
Robinson, Marilynne. Preface. John Calvin: Steward of God's Covenant: Selected Writings, edited by Thornton, John F. and Varenne, Susan B., Vintage Books, 2006, pp. xi-xxvii. Vintage Spiritual Classics.Google Scholar
Robinson, Marilynne. “Psalm Eight.” The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, Picador, 2005, pp. 227–44.Google Scholar
Ryan, Judith. The Novel after Theory. Columbia UP, 2012.Google Scholar
Shklovsky, Viktor. Theory of Prose. 1925. Translated by Benjamin Sher, Dalkey Archive Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles. “Disenchantment—Reenchantment.” The Joys of Secularism, edited by Levine, George, Princeton UP, 2011, pp. 57–73.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles. “Engaged Agency and Background in Heidegger.” The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Cambridge UP, 1993, pp. 317–36.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Harvard UP, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weele, Michael Vander. “Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and the Difficult Gift of Human Exchange.” Christianity and Literature, vol. 59, no. 2, 2010, pp. 217–39. Literary Reference Center, web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=11&sid=f8c1e226–3170–49cd-a14b-0e1794753dba%40sessionmgr102&hid=115.Google Scholar