Jan/Feb 2002 Literature Features Religion & Theology Features

ARTICLE TOOLS

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It has been remarked with wry hauteur that literary criticism is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. This conclusion was presumably the product of observing that for someone who is clever and has time on his or her hands, a piece of writing is fair game. So literary criticism is implicitly viewed as an enterprise both democratic and aristocratic: democratic because in fact the discipline does not make excessively serious demands; aristocratic because the guild of critics requires that others take its gnostic expertise excessively seriously. Such allegations may or may not be ill-deserved, but the fact that they ring a bell with those who know little enough about it— and who might not recognize good literary criticism if they saw it—at least tells us something about perceptions. You only have to be clever at talking to talk cleverly about literature.

Possibly this attitude extends to literary theory, regarded as something vaguely akin to literary criticism, their intellectual fates intertwined if not inseparable. If so, exemplifiers of the attitude might do well to peruse a substantial essay on "Christian Identity and Literary Culture," namely David Jeffrey's People of the Book, to the end that they might think again. The range of questions the author wants to pose and to address, as listed in the preface, signals clearly enough the nature of the chapters that follow, whose contents are diffuse. We have something of a tour of the land of Western literary culture through the ages; a tour that is not meant to take in everything, not even everything important; a tour whose guide is explicitly Christian with an explicitly Christian interest and agenda; a tour where the reader's attention is designed to be arrested as much ...