CAREY Postdoctoral Fellow 2005-06
Tiffany Eberle Kriner
University of Wisconsin-Madison, English
A Future and a Hope: The Eschatology of the Other
and Twentieth-Century American Literature
During the twentieth-century, world war, nuclear threats, and repeated
genocidal and racist moral failures brought humanity’s universal
need for hope to more prominent attention in the American public
sphere. Writers as diverse as Lucille Clifton, Elie Wiesel, and
Ralph Ellison, have suggested that in times defined by such crises
and continued injustice, hope and hope-making have become part of
their own duties as writers. According to Andrew Delbanco, after
mid-century, any real national or religious basis for American hope
diminished into “self-pampering” as individual Americans
became absorbed “into unconscious conformity with other interchangeable
products of the marketplace” (105). Hope from sources with
broad patent in earlier eras of American history, including God
and nation, have diminished, he argues, into more individuated and
localized hopes, which are currently failing to satisfy American
hunger for transcendence. “A Future and a Hope: The Eschatology
of the Other and Twentieth-Century American Literature” examines
one particular way in which American writers in the twentieth century
approach the increasingly difficult task of maintaining hope: an
other-focused future oriented action, emerging out of Judeo-Christian
traditions, which critiques progress, technology, utopian escapism,
and the self as modes of hope or sufficiency. The works chosen for
this project, by writers such as Denise Levertov, Lucille Clifton,
Cynthia Ozick, and Fanny Howe, are linked by a common interest in
hope that goes beyond a feeling of optimism or progression—they
create a hope that is an action, an active pursuit of justice and
a focus on the other and the future of the real world.
Using theorists and theologians, including Jürgen Moltmann,
Simone Weil, Walter Benjamin, Miroslav Volf, Nicholas Wolsterstorff,
and Emmanuel Lévinas, this project identifies a tradition
of other-focused hope-building that emerges out of religiously-inflected
literary works. It attempts to situate the other-focused literary
hopes in these works religiously, philosophically, and historically
in a counter tradition to that of hope in the individual self or
in self-expression (e.g., that displayed in novels and essays by
Ellison and, especially, Faulkner or manifest in confessional poetries).
I read the formal and generic elements within these poets and writers—e.g.,
Clifton’s sub-generic modes such as prophecy and conjure,
and Howe’s development of a poetics of “bewilderment”—as
moments where the future- and other-focus gets purchase.
“A Future and a Hope” also investigates how an eschatological
ethics of the other in post-1945 American literary texts could challenge
or be challenged by the historically subaltern position of the racial
and feminine other. The project of building hope in such a way involves
negotiating in literary forms and genres the intertwined interests
of gendered and raced identity, as well as country and deity; the
works, Fanny Howe’s in particular, also guard against letting
literary and poetic language itself become complicit in the very
injustice it seeks to point out and root out. In doing so, the works
uncover ways that language can develop and, in at least one case,
hinder a future-oriented hope that both imagines and brings to pass
the justice it seeks.
Dr. Kriner will teach ENGL 30303 - Methods: Approaches to Otherness in American Literature - for the English department in Fall 2005.
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