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Blake - Religion and Literature
Blake - Religion and Literature
SCHOLARSHIP ON T. S. ELIOT
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This, too, makes the Eliot corpus a continual site for exploring new
directions for scholarship. The issues are never definitively addressed; the
methods of inquiry are never set in stone. Such openness represents "the
possibility of the possible." to invoke Aristotle on poetry: a fresh reading is
always waiting there to be discovered, and his work also seems unusually
useful as a sounding board for our own thinking-through of the relationship
between religion and literature from different vantage points. As Eliot puts it
in "The Perfect Critic," "there is no method, except to be very intelligent."
If we seek to fulfill this criterion, then we can call Eliot a lasting influence
on our common critical enterprise.
In the range of their arguments, methods, and subjects the contributions
to this forum offer eloquent testimony to the richness of Eliot's work for
both emerging and more established scholars in the field. Each contributor
points to a new direction that future criticism on Eliot might profitably take.
Craig Woelfel's "T. S. Eliot and Our Beliefs about Belief" takes our critical reception of Eliot's conversion as a jumping-off point for exploring the
implicit narrative of secularization by which modernist literature is read
more broadly, and which Eliot evinces in an acute fashion. In response to
this narrative, Woelfel explores the implications of the debates ongoing in
a variety of fieldsreligious studies, philosophy, history, and sociology
about the nature and scope of secularization for our work as religion and
literature scholars. In doing so, he calls for a more direct interrogation of
the models of narrative and subjectivity through which we engage belief
in modernity, the ways that we define the "religion" half of our discipline,
and the questions that we ask about belief
Woelfel's piece is not alone in insisting on the necessity of re-thinking
the implications of the narratives we have written about religion in Eliot's
life and work. Barry Spurr's "Anglo-Cadiolicism and the 'religious turn' in
Eliot's poetry" interrogates critical reception of the central event of any
narrative of Eliot's religious life, his conversion. Spurr argues that we must
better understand Eliot's Anglo-Catholicism in its historicized context, and
in the context of Eliot's own thought, than we have previously done. He
shows convincingly that such contexts give the lie to the recurring temptation
to view Eliot's conversion as a dramatic turn, a "revolutionary tita nuova in
both his personal existence and his birth" leading to fulfillment in AngloCatholic belief Instead, he offers a better picture of what it really meant to
be a convert to Anglo-Catholicism in Eliot's particular time and place. By
extension he suggests that, as a narrative model, we might do better to follow
the dominant leitmotif in Eliot's own work, the frustrated hero's journey.
This journey extends in both directions across the particular moment of
Eliot's conversion such diat the onset of Christian belief can hardly be said
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Jewel Spears Brooker's '"Our First World': T S. Eliot and the Edenic
Imagination" offers, in some senses, a counterpoint to Spurr's historicized
conception of Eliot's unconsummated religious journey. It offers instead an
entirely new critical framework for understanding Eliot's religious development retrospectively, and as a whole, taking Eliot as an exemplar of her
concept of "the Edenic imagination, a religious version of the dialectical
imagination." The Edenic imagination is a retrospective pattern that Brooker
argues characterizes both particular works and Eliot's overa life. She illustrates the pattern through a reading of the ways in which "Little Gidding"
"loops back dialecticay" to the beginning of Four Quartets, and second, to
Eliot's earliest unpublished prose. The result gives a shape to Eliot's work
and life that, as Brooker says, is reflected in both ancient religions and "the
landmarks of Western literature."
John Morgenstern's "The 'Centre of Intensity': T. S. Eliot's Reassessment
of Baudelaire in 1910-11 Paris" starts in Eliot's beginnings as a poet rather
than his end. The piece iustrates that promising avenues of research on
Eliot and religion wi also come from a deeper investigation of the poet's
religious engagement in the time well before his conversion. Morgenstern
analyzes the literary and cultural contexts converging in Eliot's reassessment
of Baudelaire in the time surrounding his "Paris year" (1910-1911). Again
using Schuchard as counterpoint, he convincingly demonstrates the ways in
which the work and thought of Jacques Rivire deserve attention in Eliot's
complex poetic-religious development. The resulting argument shows that,
despite the wealth of extant scholarship on Eliot's inteectual and literary
sources and influences, much that has been overlooked remains to be discovered. To borrow from Eliot himself, it also shows that such discoveries bear
fruit not as ends in themselves but because they add to our understanding
of the matrix of the writer's work.
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Volume 2, in over 800 pages, takes us only to the year 1925. Volume 3 of
the Letters (1926-1927) has just been published this September, from series
editor John Haffenden; the seven-volume Complete Prose, under the general
editorship of Ronald Schuchard; the two-volume Complete Poems, edited by
Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue; and the Complete Plays, again edited by
John Haffenden. The impact that such efforts will make on future research
in Eliot cannot possibly be underestimated. For researchers who might feel
daunted, or perhaps just exhausted, by the staggering volume of scholarship
that already exists on Eliot's work, the thought of gaining full access to all
of the primary material represents a truly refreshing prospect for further
innovation.
Of course, such new materials wl only go as far as scholars are willing
to push them. This forum humbly presents its own sense of what some new
directions may be; but, more than that, it represents the promise that Eliot's
work and thought wl be a continued source of inspiration and of critical
conversation.
NOTES
1. See John J. McDonald, "Religion and Literature," Religion & Literature 16.1 (^'Vinter
1984): 61-71.
2. Eliot's argument is developed over the course of his essay. "Religion and Literature"
can be found in his Selected Prose ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt, 1975), 97-106
Unless otherwise noted, quotations from Eliot's poems and plays throughout the forum refer
to published versions in The Complete Poems and Plays:] 909-1950, (New York: Harcourt Brace
&Company), [1971] 1980. For references to The M&ffeZflM, an abnormality in Eliot's printed
works in the sense that it is printed with line numbers, both page and line are provided. .
3. Eliot later tackled some of these pivotal questions in Notes Towards the Definition of
Culture, where he emphasizes the point that Christianity played a foundational role in the
formation of a common culture in the West. Even the skepticism of a Voltaire or a Nietzsche,
Eliot reckons, was itself a byproduct of Christian religion. The Bible, moreover, exerted a
seminal literary influence on Western culture, as he claims in "Religion and Literature,"
"not because it has been considered literature, but because it has been considered the report
of the Word of God."
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