User:Sherrilledwards/sandbox: Difference between revisions

Line 38:

But religion persisted. Partly, this was an aggressive counter-revolution, including Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), with his ''Syllabus of Errors'' (1864) and Definition of Papal Infallibility (1871), and Protestant fundamentalism, seen in ''The Fundamentals'' (1910–1915) and proclaiming another form of infallibility—an inerrant text. Within the infallible world of Marxist-Leninism, religion grew, maybe because it was attacked. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,Marx’s critique of religion has lost much, but not all, of its potency. The secularization thesis requires modification.

An example of such modification is Peter Berger’s book, ''A Rumor of Angels.''{{sfn|Berger|1969}} My title alludes to his book, and to a recent usage by Philip Yancey (1997). Berger suggests that there exist certain “signals of transcendence”—such as the human desire for order—that point beyond a purely naturalistic reality.{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}{{efn| “By signals of transcendence I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}}} However, as Berger recognizes, for most people the{{pg|334|335}} predominant reality is still that secular mind-set. Thus, religious language is used by a “cognitive minority." {{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}{{efn| “By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society. Put differently, a cognitive minority is a group formed around a body of deviant ~~‘knowledge’”~~{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}}} This position is uncomfortable, needing to be buttressed socially and epistemologically. But the position exists.

An example of such modification is Peter Berger’s book, ''A Rumor of Angels.''{{sfn|Berger|1969}} My title alludes to his book, and to a recent usage by Philip Yancey (1997). Berger suggests that there exist certain “signals of transcendence”—such as the human desire for order—that point beyond a purely naturalistic reality.{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}{{efn| “By signals of transcendence I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}}} However, as Berger recognizes, for most people the{{pg|334|335}} predominant reality is still that secular mind-set. Thus, religious language is used by a “cognitive minority." {{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}{{efn| “By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society. Put differently, a cognitive minority is a group formed around a body of deviant ‘knowledge.’”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}}} This position is uncomfortable, needing to be buttressed socially and epistemologically. But the position exists.

Today, the relationship between religion and modernity is more nuanced than in the naturalistic Nineteenth Century. We recognize a wide spectrum from faith through doubt to atheism. But at the risk of simplification, there seem to be two main approaches. For conservative Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be expressed as a ''rejection'' of modernity, using an either/or approach to truth. For those with liberal perspectives on Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be regarded as ''complementary'' to modernity, utilizing a both/and approach to truth. That complementary perspective may remind us of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. This is not simply a literary trope.{{efn| Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg revealed the inescapable reality of indeterminacy in our world.}} In both humanities and physical sciences, there will be no return to rigid determinism.

Line 46:

It is easy to list God-language in Hemingway: deciding significance is harder. The title of ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} came perhaps unconsciously from an English Prayer: “Give us peace in our time, O Lord” (1928 31).{{sfn|1993}} {{efn|“Give us peace in our time, O Lord” can be found in the 1928 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer,{{sfn|1993|p=31}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}}}} In this work, however, there is little overt God-language, maybe the awkwardness of Krebs with his mother’s sentimentalism in a “A Soldier’s Home”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=76}} or the unnamed soldier’s fearful bargaining with God in the accompanying vignette.{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=67}} Perhaps the final story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” with Nick Adams dealing with an indeterminate trauma by returning to Nature, has echoes of Genesis in its simple declarative sentences, “It was a good camp” and “It was a good feeling."{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=147}} The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it,"{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} could be seen as a ''signifier'' of modernism, much as the final words of Kurtz, “The horror, the horror”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=178}} from ''Heart of Darkness.'' Conrad’s words, Cedric Watts suggests, “serve as a thematic nexus, a climatic but highly ambiguous utterance which sums up, without resolving, several of the paradoxical themes of the tale."{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=215}} A quarter century later, Hemingway’s ''In Our Time'' offers yet another such thematic nexus.

In The Sun Also Rises,{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} two themes are balanced. One epigraph,“You are all a lost generation,” from Gertrude Stein, suggests that the narrative is a war novel, although the war seems absent. The other epigraph from Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most secular passage in the bible, includes the words, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth {{pg|335|336}}abideth for ever."{{sfn|1926|p=Ecc. 1.4–7}} This theme, the continuation of the earth, is a metonymy for the continuation of humanity. Linda Wagner-Martin suggests this theme “maintains its ~~dominance” (~~6).10 Maybe this motif is an attenuated form of providence.

In The Sun Also Rises,{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} two themes are balanced. One epigraph,“You are all a lost generation,” from Gertrude Stein, suggests that the narrative is a war novel, although the war seems absent. The other epigraph from Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most secular passage in the bible, includes the words, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth {{pg|335|336}}abideth for ever."{{sfn|1926|p=Ecc. 1.4–7}} This theme, the continuation of the earth, is a metonymy for the continuation of humanity. Linda Wagner-Martin suggests this theme “maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}{{efn|“Considering the two epigraphs in tandem, no reader could stay focused for long on the ‘lost generation’ image. The tone of the second epigraph is clearly positive; it is much longer; it maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}}}}10 Maybe this motif is an attenuated form of providence.

There is a kind of balance in Jake and Brett’s conversation following the Romero ''debacle.'' Brett’s decision “not to be a bitch” represents she claims, “sort of what we have instead of God."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} Jake counters, “Some people have God, quite a lot,” but Brett replies, “He never worked very well with me."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} The famous ending is poised among irony, ambiguity, and pessimism. Partly a verdict on Jake and Brett’s tragic relationship, it becomes a larger evaluation of life. With Brett, we like to believe we can have “a damned good time;" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}} we hope the world is a place of order. But in answer, the novel offers only indeterminacy: a delicate balance between covert God-language and hard-boiled modernism. We are left with Jake’s summary: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}}

A Farewell to Arms{{sfn|Hemingway|1929}} marks a new skepticism, with Hemingway’s famous dismissal of war’s high diction as “obscene.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=185}} It was also a low point for Hemingway, considering his divorce from Hadley in 1927 and his father’s suicide in 1928. As Reynolds argues, Hemingway frames the Italian retreat from Caporetto as a synecdoche of a larger human defeat.{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=274}} This, says Reynolds, was the “final conclusion” of the war generation {{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}{{efn|“Some discovered such a truth in the trenches during the war; others discovered it in war prisons or in front of firing squads.Hemingway did not finally understand it until ten years after the war.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}}} But what of the priest in A Farewell to Arms: is the Abruzzi a kind of sacred space? It might be, butHenry cannot seem to get there. As a modern man, he seems to be “banished.”{{sfn|Civello|1994|p=78}}{{efn|“The Abruzzi, however, is an anomaly in the modern world, and the Christian order it represents no longer exists beyond its boundaries. Frederick Henry, the epitome of the modern displaced hero, yearns nostalgically for that ‘other country’ yet finds himself ‘banished’ from it by his own modern sensibilities." {{sfn|Civello|1994|p=77-78}}}} Heroism still exists, but the irrationality of modern warfare—or the cruelty of Fate— renders it tragically absurd. Toward the end, we read

<blockquote>If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. {{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=249}} </blockquote>

=== Notes ===

Line 77:

Line 81:

* {{cite book |last=Chadwick |first=Owen |date=1975 |title=The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century|location=Cambridge |publisher= Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Civello |first=Paul |date=1994 |title=American Literary Naturalism and its Twentieth-Century Transformation |location=Athens |publisher=University of California Press, 2003 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |date=2008 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |location=Ed. Cedric Watts. Oxford |publisher= Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}

Line 83:

Line 89:

* {{cite book |last=Gellner |first=Ernest |date=1975 |title=Legitimation of Belief |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1929 |title=A Farewell to Arms|location=New York |publisher= Scribner, 2003 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1984 |title=Ernest Hemingway on Writing|location= Ed. Larry W. Phillips. New York |publisher= Touchstone |ref=harv }}

Line 113:

Line 121:

* {{cite book |last=Popkin |first=Richard H. |date=2003 |title=The History of Skepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle |location=Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1976 |title=Hemingway's First War |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Sipiora |first=Phillip |title=Norman Mailer: Metaphysician at Work |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2.1 |date=2008 |pages=502-506 |ref=harv }}

Line 121:

Line 131:

* {{cite journal |last=Stoneback |first=H.R. |title=Pilgrimage Variations: Hemingway's Sacred Landscapes |journal=Religion and Literature |volume=35.2/3 |issue= |date=2003 |pages=49-65 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Wagner-Martin |first=Linda |date=1987|title=Introduction |journal= New Essays on The Sun Also Rises |location= Cambridge|publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Whalen-Bridge |first=John and Angela Oon |title=Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998-2008 |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=3.1 |date=2009 |pages=212-243 |ref=harv }}

@@ Line 38: / Line 38: @@
 But religion persisted. Partly, this was an aggressive counter-revolution, including Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), with his ''Syllabus of Errors'' (1864) and Definition of Papal Infallibility (1871), and Protestant fundamentalism, seen in ''The Fundamentals'' (1910–1915) and proclaiming another form of infallibility—an inerrant text. Within the infallible world of Marxist-Leninism, religion grew, maybe because it was attacked. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,Marx’s critique of religion has lost much, but not all, of its potency. The secularization thesis requires modification.
-An example of such modification is Peter Berger’s book, ''A Rumor of Angels.''{{sfn|Berger|1969}} My title alludes to his book, and to a recent usage by Philip Yancey (1997). Berger suggests that there exist certain “signals of transcendence”—such as the human desire for order—that point beyond a purely naturalistic reality.{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}{{efn| “By signals of transcendence I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}}} However, as Berger recognizes, for most people the{{pg|334|335}} predominant reality is still that secular mind-set. Thus, religious language is used by a “cognitive minority." {{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}{{efn| “By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society. Put differently, a cognitive minority is a group formed around a body of deviant ‘knowledge’”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}}} This position is uncomfortable, needing to be buttressed socially and epistemologically. But the position exists.
+An example of such modification is Peter Berger’s book, ''A Rumor of Angels.''{{sfn|Berger|1969}} My title alludes to his book, and to a recent usage by Philip Yancey (1997). Berger suggests that there exist certain “signals of transcendence”—such as the human desire for order—that point beyond a purely naturalistic reality.{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}{{efn| “By signals of transcendence I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}}} However, as Berger recognizes, for most people the{{pg|334|335}} predominant reality is still that secular mind-set. Thus, religious language is used by a “cognitive minority." {{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}{{efn| “By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society. Put differently, a cognitive minority is a group formed around a body of deviant ‘knowledge.’”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}}} This position is uncomfortable, needing to be buttressed socially and epistemologically. But the position exists.
 Today, the relationship between religion and modernity is more nuanced than in the naturalistic Nineteenth Century. We recognize a wide spectrum from faith through doubt to atheism. But at the risk of simplification, there seem to be two main approaches. For conservative Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be expressed as a ''rejection'' of modernity, using an either/or approach to truth. For those with liberal perspectives on Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be regarded as ''complementary'' to modernity, utilizing a both/and approach to truth. That complementary perspective may remind us of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. This is not simply a literary trope.{{efn| Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg revealed the inescapable reality of indeterminacy in our world.}} In both humanities and physical sciences, there will be no return to rigid determinism.
@@ Line 46: / Line 46: @@
 It is easy to list God-language in Hemingway: deciding significance is harder. The title of ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} came perhaps unconsciously from an English Prayer: “Give us peace in our time, O Lord” (1928 31).{{sfn|1993}} {{efn|“Give us peace in our time, O Lord” can be found in the 1928 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer,{{sfn|1993|p=31}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}}}} In this work, however, there is little overt God-language, maybe the awkwardness of Krebs with his mother’s sentimentalism in a “A Soldier’s Home”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=76}}  or the unnamed soldier’s fearful bargaining with God in the accompanying vignette.{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=67}} Perhaps the final story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” with Nick Adams dealing with an indeterminate trauma by returning to Nature, has echoes of Genesis in its simple declarative sentences, “It was a good camp” and “It was a good feeling."{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=147}} The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it,"{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} could be seen as a ''signifier'' of modernism, much as the final words of Kurtz, “The horror, the horror”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=178}} from ''Heart of Darkness.'' Conrad’s words, Cedric Watts suggests, “serve as a thematic nexus, a climatic but highly ambiguous utterance which sums up, without resolving, several of the paradoxical themes of the tale."{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=215}} A quarter century later, Hemingway’s ''In Our Time'' offers yet another such thematic nexus.
-In The Sun Also Rises,{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} two themes are balanced. One epigraph,“You are all a lost generation,” from Gertrude Stein, suggests that the narrative is a war novel, although the war seems absent. The other epigraph from Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most secular passage in the bible, includes the words, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth {{pg|335|336}}abideth for ever."{{sfn|1926|p=Ecc. 1.4–7}} This theme, the continuation of the earth, is a metonymy for the continuation of humanity. Linda Wagner-Martin suggests this theme “maintains its dominance” (6).10 Maybe this motif is an attenuated form of providence.
+In The Sun Also Rises,{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} two themes are balanced. One epigraph,“You are all a lost generation,” from Gertrude Stein, suggests that the narrative is a war novel, although the war seems absent. The other epigraph from Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most secular passage in the bible, includes the words, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth {{pg|335|336}}abideth for ever."{{sfn|1926|p=Ecc. 1.4–7}} This theme, the continuation of the earth, is a metonymy for the continuation of humanity. Linda Wagner-Martin suggests this theme “maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}{{efn|“Considering the two epigraphs in tandem, no reader could stay focused for long on the ‘lost generation’ image. The tone of the second epigraph is clearly positive; it is much longer; it maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}}}}10 Maybe this motif is an attenuated form of providence.
 There is a kind of balance in Jake and Brett’s conversation following the Romero ''debacle.'' Brett’s decision “not to be a bitch” represents she claims, “sort of what we have instead of God."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} Jake counters, “Some people have God, quite a lot,” but Brett replies, “He never worked very well with me."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} The famous ending is poised among irony, ambiguity, and pessimism. Partly a verdict on Jake and Brett’s tragic relationship, it becomes a larger evaluation of life. With Brett, we like to believe we can have “a damned good time;" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}} we hope the world is a place of order. But in answer, the novel offers only indeterminacy: a delicate balance between covert God-language and hard-boiled modernism. We are left with Jake’s summary: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}}
+A Farewell to Arms{{sfn|Hemingway|1929}} marks a new skepticism, with Hemingway’s famous dismissal of war’s high diction as “obscene.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=185}} It was also a low point for Hemingway, considering his divorce from Hadley in 1927 and his father’s suicide in 1928. As Reynolds argues, Hemingway frames the Italian retreat from Caporetto as a synecdoche of a larger human defeat.{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=274}} This, says Reynolds, was the “final conclusion” of the war generation {{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}{{efn|“Some discovered such a truth in the trenches during the war; others discovered it in war prisons or in front of firing squads.Hemingway did not finally understand it until ten years after the war.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}}} But what of the priest in A Farewell to Arms: is the Abruzzi a kind of sacred space? It might be, butHenry cannot seem to get there. As a modern man, he seems to be “banished.”{{sfn|Civello|1994|p=78}}{{efn|“The Abruzzi, however, is an anomaly in the modern world, and the Christian order it represents no longer exists beyond its boundaries. Frederick Henry, the epitome of the modern displaced hero, yearns nostalgically for that ‘other country’ yet finds himself ‘banished’ from it by his own modern sensibilities." {{sfn|Civello|1994|p=77-78}}}} Heroism still exists, but the irrationality of modern warfare—or the cruelty of Fate— renders it tragically absurd. Toward the end, we read
+<blockquote>If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. {{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=249}} </blockquote>
 === Notes ===
@@ Line 77: / Line 81: @@
 * {{cite book |last=Chadwick |first=Owen |date=1975 |title=The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century|location=Cambridge |publisher= Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite book |last=Civello |first=Paul |date=1994 |title=American Literary Naturalism and its Twentieth-Century Transformation |location=Athens |publisher=University of California Press, 2003 |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |date=2008 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |location=Ed. Cedric Watts. Oxford |publisher= Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}
@@ Line 83: / Line 89: @@
 * {{cite book |last=Gellner |first=Ernest |date=1975 |title=Legitimation of Belief |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1929 |title=A Farewell to Arms|location=New York |publisher= Scribner, 2003  |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1984 |title=Ernest Hemingway on Writing|location= Ed. Larry W. Phillips. New York |publisher= Touchstone  |ref=harv }}
@@ Line 113: / Line 121: @@
 * {{cite book |last=Popkin |first=Richard H. |date=2003 |title=The History of Skepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle |location=Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1976 |title=Hemingway's First War |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton University Press |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite journal |last=Sipiora |first=Phillip |title=Norman Mailer: Metaphysician at Work |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2.1 |date=2008 |pages=502-506 |ref=harv }}
@@ Line 121: / Line 131: @@
 * {{cite journal |last=Stoneback |first=H.R. |title=Pilgrimage Variations: Hemingway's Sacred Landscapes |journal=Religion and Literature |volume=35.2/3 |issue= |date=2003 |pages=49-65 |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite journal |last=Wagner-Martin |first=Linda |date=1987|title=Introduction |journal= New Essays on The Sun Also Rises |location= Cambridge|publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite journal |last=Whalen-Bridge |first=John and Angela Oon |title=Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998-2008 |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=3.1 |date=2009 |pages=212-243 |ref=harv }}