A future and a hope: Eschatology of the other in twentieth-century American literature by women (Marianne Moore, Zora Neale Hurston, Lucille Clifton, Fanny Howe).
详细信息
- 作者：Kriner ; Tiffany Eberle.
- 学历：Doctor
- 年：2005
- 导师：Keller, Lynn
- 毕业院校：The University of Wisconsin
- 专业：Literature, American.;Theology.;Women's Studies.
- ISBN：0542138212
- CBH：3175419
- Country：USA
- 语种：English
- FileSize：24917660
- Pages：277
文摘
This dissertation examines the literary responses of four American writers, Marianne Moore, Zora Neale Hurston, Lucille Clifton, and Fanny Howe, to the problem of maintaining hope. In a time marked by hope's diminishment from reliance on a national or religious collectivities to "the vanishing point of the self" (Andrew Delbanco, The Real American Dream 103), these writers' works generate resilient hope. They do so not through self-assertion and representations thereof, as Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner advocated, but by representing non-unitary subjectivity in a future-oriented attention to the other. The distinctiveness of the strain of literature I have termed the "eschatology of the other," a hope defined in part by the theology of Jurgen Moltmann, according to which eschatology doesn't mean focus on "last things" but the hope that attention to "last things" infuses into life. Eschatology of the other involves resistance to the present, active participatory justice, attention to the other, a drive toward the future, and complication of identity. I find this eschatology associated with moments of interest in religion and spirituality in the texts, sometimes from an author's stated interest but often from the subject matter of the texts. These works' hopes, I argue, in their attention to the other, expand beyond the self or local community toward the world.;This eschatology of the other is represented formally in Moore's and Clifton's poetry, Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain, and Howe's Saving History, often in textual innovations outside those traditionally linked with eschatology. Some of the formal strategies contributing to the eschatology of the other are associated with literary developments within modernism or postmodernism---e.g. collaged addition of quotations into poetic text, generation of generic hybrids, and experimentation with the syntax of the sentence.;This study calls into question common feminist and African-Americanist understandings---products of the 1970s social climate but still prevalent in literary criticism---that literary coming-to-voice or identity is a means to social change. Its critical lens also expands academic analysis of "religious" texts, countering the commonplace assumption that such literature, especially in Judeo-Christian traditions, rests on untenable notions of unified subjectivity.