Narrative, Religion and Science: Fundamentalism Versus Irony, 1700-1999

Couverture
Cambridge University Press, 28 mars 2002 - 281 pages
An increasing number of contemporary scientists, philosophers and theologians downplay their professional authority and describe their work as simply "telling stories about the world". If this is so, literary criticism can and should be applied to all these fields. Yet story telling is neither innocent nor empty-handed. Register, rhetoric, and imagery all manipulate in their own ways. Above all, irony emerges as the natural mode of our modern fragmented culture. Since the eighteenth century there have been only two possible ways of understanding the world--the fundamentalist and the ironic.
 

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Table des matières

POSTMODERNISM GRAND NARRATIVES AND JUSTSO STORIES
14
JUSTSO STORIES
23
NARRATIVE AND IRONY
32
LANGUAGE CULTURE AND REALITY
46
NEWTON AND KISSINGER SCIENCE AS IRONY?
54
REVOLUTIONS AND PARADIGMS
62
MODELS OF REALITY
71
AMBIGUITY AND IRONY
81
THE ACHE IN THE MISSING LIMB LANGUAGE TRUTH AND PRESENCE
157
THE PHYSIOGNOMY OF DEVELOPMENT
170
THE ORIGINS OF MEANING
179
PRESENCE AND ABSENCE
189
TWENTIETHCENTURY FUNDAMENTALISMS THEOLOGY TRUTH AND IRONY
195
RELIGION AS AESTHETICS
207
READING REALITY
217
SCIENCE AND RELIGION LANGUAGE METAPHOR AND CONSILIENCE
225

LEARNING TO SAY I LITERATURE AND SUBJECTIVITY
94
THE IDEA OF LITERATURE
107
THE IDEAL OF THE FRAGMENT
114
TWO KINDS OF TRUTH?
121
RECONSTRUCTING RELIGION FRAGMENTATION TYPOLOGY AND SYMBOLISM
128
RELIGIONS OF NATURE AND OF THE HEART
135
MILLENARIAN FRAGMENTS AND ORGANIC WHOLES
141
KEBLE AND ROSSETTI
148
LANGUAGE AS CHANGE
233
A REBIRTH OF IMAGES
239
THE FABRIC OF THE UNIVERSE
247
THE TOMB OF NAPOLEON
256
BIBLOGRAPHY
264
INDEX
274
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À propos de l'auteur (2002)

Stephen Prickett is Professor of English at Duke University, North Carolina. Prior to this he was Regius Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow. He took his BA at Cambridge (Trinity Hall) and subsequently did postgraduate work in Oxford (University College) and back in Cambridge, where he took his PhD in 1968. Previous appointments include the Chair of English at the Australian National University in Canberra (1983-9), and teaching posts at the Universities of Sussex (1967-82), Minnesota (1979-80), and Smith College, Massachusetts(1970-1). Aarhus University, Denmark (1997) and Singapore (1999). He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, former Chairman of the UK Higher Education Foundation, President of the European Society for the Study of Literature and Theology, and of the George MacDonald Society. He has published one novel, thirteen monographs, some seventy five articles on Romanticism, Victorian Studies and related topics, especially on literature and theology, including Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth (1970), Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (1976), Victorian Fantasy (1978), The Romantics (ed.) (1981), Words and the Word: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation (1986), Reading the Text: Biblical Criticism and Literary Theory (ed. 1991), and Origins of Narrative: the Romantic Appropriation of the Bible (1996). He is also joint author (with Robert Barnes) of the volume on the Bible for the Cambridge University Press Landmarks of World Literature Series (1991), and joint editor (with Robert Carroll) of the Oxford University Press World's Classics Bible (1997) and (with David Jasper) of the new Blackwells Reader in Literature and Religion (1999). He is General Editor of the Macmillan Romanticism in Perspective Series, and editorial consultant to the Oxford Bible Commentary Series and to Blackwells Bible Commentaries.

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