WESTERN
CONFERENCE ON CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE
Belief
& Unbelief in New American Fiction
Nicole
Blair on Extremely
Loud & Incredibly Close
The
narrative reflects what Truth looks like in a postmodern world. It is
meta-textual, inter-textual, with blank pages, full pages, pictures,
and other unconventional methods. The story is in the form of a
quest-journey. The narrative enacts our desire to turn back time to
before the tragedy; but then what? What would we do then?
The
story builds a mythology of New York City.
The
child protagonist does not believe in God, because God is an
abstraction. Belief is fraught with problems, esp. when trying to
establish a sense of self. He cannot return to innocence. But he can
re-member (put something back together). The youth of the narrator
(age 8) is essential to understanding the novel's project. His
innocence & vulnerability represent the nation's inability to
face tragedy.
Steven
Funk on Danielewski's House
of Leaves
The
novel seems to mock religion and literacy, but is not that simple.
Used in a narratology course. A multi-layered book with many
narrators, self-reflexivity, footnotes, pictures, divided/concrete
texts, various fonts, colored ink, etc. Is it a hypertext? More like
Blake than like e-texts. It offers many representations of “queer
failure.”
The
main couple never gets married. Why not? The book offers
forgetfulness of its own narration. Green fails to mother her
children and is a narcissist, but the narrator asks the reader to
forget this fact.
There
are deliberate insults to the reader, misleading. Trying to
annihilate our sense of decency.
Undoes
popular notions of faith. Uses Biblical allusions, but challenges our
notions of truth in many ways.
The
novel challenges our idea of postmodern literature. It refuses to be
successful in any of its narrative layers. The reader is left with
more disappointment than resolution. The novel seeks to fail. It
offers no reliability, no closure. It does not preach a need to
reproduce, produce, succeed. House
of Leaves
believes in failure.
Walter
Hesford on Alan Heathcock's Volt
A
cycle of short stories. Two protagonists act as suffering servants,
offering grace within the postmodern fragmented community and a
context that questions “sacred violence.” Violence is not shown
to be redemptive. Story cycles work well to show contemporary lives
of broken communities. They are de-centric; they fragment time; they
leave gaps. Volt
is in the anti-transcendental tradition of Hawthorne & O'Connor.
America,
post-war, has a culture of lost fathers and sons, naturalized
violence against women & children. The setting of Volt
is clearly postmodern, beset by disasters.
The
protagonists strive to keep the peace and keep the faith. There is no
postmodern worship of meaninglessness. Pain and guilt cannot redeem.
A saving empathy witnesses against violence. The book offers a study
of “lived religion” (Hungerford). It is “full of particular
life,” full of religion's difficulties and the problem of
meaninglessness in the face of suffering, and of being religious in a
secular world.
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