CAREY Postdoctoral Fellow 2005-06
Randy Boyagoda
Boston University, English
Reading the Human Person Back into the Humanities
Fragmentation, irony, power relations, and a presumption against
the possibility of transcendent truth mark much of contemporary
literary studies. This research seeks to develop a Catholic literary
theory intent upon engaging these regnant, secular concepts of literature’s
purposes and moral value. Its Catholic hermeneutic for literary
theory integrates elements of John Paul II’s personalist theology,
Paul Ricoeur’s narrative theory, Han Urs von Balthasar’s
theological aesthetic, and Jacques Maritain’s vocational concept
of the artist. At its foundation, Reading the Human Person Back
into the Humanities relies upon an Augustinian understanding of
the relationship between justice, charity, and culture. It seeks
to provide a theologically-informed, theoretical framework for readings
of literature and film that attest to the intact dignity of the
human person, the artist’s role in testifying to the wholeness
of man, and the reader’s responsibility for integrating ethics
with aesthetics.
The introductory chapter surveys recent attempts to integrate Catholic
thought with secular literary theory, from Nicholas Boyle, Denis
Donoghue, Slavoj Zizek and Terry Eagleton. It also offers readings
of fiction by Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje and others
that disclose the potential insights available to literary scholarship
through a combination of personalist theology and Augustinian cultural
analysis. Chapter Two expands upon my prior study of Ricoeur’s
Time and Narrative and postcolonial literature. Through Ricoeur,
and with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children as the
primary text, I engage work by Edward Said and Homi Bhabha on the
vexing question of postcolonial writing’s relationship to
native and imperial legacies and on the politics of remembrance.
Chapter Three is concerned with the aesthetic dimensions of John
Paul II’s personalist theology and focuses on his study of
the ethical considerations of the human person’s artistic
representation from his Theology of the Body. Through readings of
Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” and other
works, I draw John Paul’s thought into critical conversation
with Michel Foucault, Susan Sontag, and W.G. Sebald regarding the
ethics and cultural implications of how the human body is aesthetically
rendered. Turning to Balthasar’s The Glory of the Lord in
Chapter Four, I focus on his Christ-centered call for a re-integration
of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful as the bedrock for a humane
approach to the arts. I test this approach in readings of poetry
by Gerard Manley Hopkins and Walt Whitman and fiction by Herman
Melville and Flannery O’Connor. The final chapter applies
Maritain’s concept of the religious artist from Art and Scholasticism
to the films of Martin Scorsese and Denys Arcand. This twenty-first
century Catholic literary theory reads artistic works in search
of the felt shape of human stories and the integral sanctity of
the human body. It involves a Christ-centered valuation of the classical
elements of aesthetic appreciation and a vocational appreciation
of the artist’s purposes. Ultimately, it seeks to articulate
a relationship between justice, cultural expressions, and principles
of communal purpose that refuses to compromise with the nihilistic
tendencies of postmodern culture.
Dr. Boyagoda will teach ENGL 30166 - American Literary Traditions II - for the English department in Spring 2006.
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