Zunshine Response

            Zunshine's discussion of cognitive psychological approaches to literature brought up a few thoughts, particularly as I am going through the formative stages of writing my final paper for this course. My essay focuses particularly on Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and a long-standing debate among scholars about the influence of detective fiction on the novella. Thus, I found Zunshine's discussion of detective fiction to be fascinating for my own, admittedly selfish reasons. What I think was itneresting about Zunshine's discussion was that she has pinpointed in some ways the essence of what makes the genre function, that is, the challenge of multiple layers of metarepresentation, ultimately causing us to question our theory of mind for numerous elements of a narrative.

            In the last fifty years or so, however, detective fiction has been used in some really interesting ways. As far back as 1971 a scholar by the name of Michael Holquist was proposing that detective fiction is to the postmodern novel what myth was to the modernists. (For more on that look into Holquist's essay "Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction") However, the application that Holquist identifies is one that operates largely on the metfictional level. As an example he uses Jorge Luis Borges' story "Death and the Compass" in which the detective goes through the motions of the detective genre, locating clues, a series of events that place every individual under suspicion. What differs is that when the detective finds out that he knows where the fourth and final murder is going to take place, he arrives and finds that he is actually the victim of the last murder. There is a kind of embroilment of the detective into the crime itself that lends itself (at least as Holquist argues) to the usage of detective stories as metaphysical commentary in postmodern fiction.

            What I wonder, then, is how metafiction might play into Zunshine's model. I think many of the appeals of metafiction are similar to those that we find in detective fiction, but it seems to alter some of the other things that Zunshine is currently treating as given elements. Her discussion of verisimilitude and emotional investment in narrative despite our awareness of its fictionality seems to be usurped in nearly all instances of metafiction, in which the story preys on the fact that it can constantly remind us that we are reading.

            In dealing with The Crying of Lot 49 I think the question of what the detection elements of the story are doing for us are of concern as well. The story, of course, is of Oedipa Maas, who finds herself unexpectedly the executor of the will of one Pierce Invariarty. Throughout her attempts to deal with the will she finds herself further involved in the investigation of the enigmatic Tristero (a possible alternative postal system for which Pierce apparently has a massive collection of stamps). However, when Oedipa arrives at the end of the novella the only conclusion that can be drawn on the mystery of Trystero is a series of four conclusions, all equally possible and all equally true, which are presented to the reader. Beyond the last word of the novel, hypothetically, we find out if Oedipa is crazy, or if there is a plot of some sort in which she has had a trick played on her, or if Trystero really does exist, or she is hallucinating it all. But there is no possible resolution. Yet, the novella is treated in such a way that we invest ourselves in the mystery of Trystero as we would in a piece of detective fiction. So the novella has me asking on two levels how a cognitive approach would deal with this narrative -- First, how does metafiction play into our metarepresentations, and what complex of cognitive processes does it trigger? Second, what is Pynchon doing that makes the lack of resolution to his 'detective' story so captivating? Is this an instance what Zunshine was saying about infinite genre permutations? Does this particular combination work? 

            Lastly, on a totally unrelated note I wondered about the current literary fascination with genre busting and what Zunshine has to say about manifestations of genre mashup, etc.

Emily Klotz

ENGL 601

4/15/12

I’M WALKIN ON ZUNSHINE!

Sorry, I just couldn’t resist.

Why We Read Fiction was both intriguing and disappointing to me. I think (this is really silly of me) that a major part of the reason it was disappointing was the title. Although of course I know, consciously, that there is probably no clear answer to why we read fiction, I think that I had some subconscious expectations that this book would bring me to some kind of enlightenment about why people (most importantly, me) not only enjoy but actually need fiction. The title of this book made me secretly hope that I was finally going to get some answers. And I think that Zunshine knew that I would think that.

(See what I did there? Three levels of metarepresentation!)

However, although I did not reach enlightenment from this book, I found it extremely interesting the entire way through, particularly in Zunshine’s close analyses of the unreliable narrators in Clarissa and Lolita - which was surprising, actually, as I expected the section about detective fiction to be the most interesting to me, but I though the extremely close scrutiny of Lovelace and Humbert was really effective. I really did not know much at all about cognitive literary theory before going into this book, and Zunshine presented it in a way that I found both easy to follow and fascinating. In the final chapter especially, Zunshine seemed to be asserting that cognitive theory really could explain why we read fiction – one day. But of course, at the moment, it is simply too early to fully grasp. So the titular question remains mostly unanswered, though Zunshine has done her best to shine some cognitive light on it.

It’s hard to say why exactly I feel a little unsatisfied by Zunshine’s answer to the question of why we read fiction. I found all her analyses insightful, and the connections to autism and schizophrenia that she discussed early on were, to me, indicative that she was definitely on to something. But I wonder if possibly my slight dissatisfaction was related to another (less silly) disappointment I had with this book: that Zunshine largely failed to discuss any kind of fiction outside of the realm of the novel. I was personally reading this book with my final paper in mind, which of course is not about a novel but a computer game. And Myst particularly demands that the player be a detective, attempting to read the minds of the characters based not only on what they say about themselves and about each other, but on the physical evidence left behind by them in the various worlds of the game. But, of course, the mind-reading that must be done in order to “solve” the game is, I think, a bit different than the mind-reading required to “solve” a detective novel – or any novel. And the resolution of the narrative itself is dependent on the player’s ability to do this, rather than in a novel where the ending will be the same no matter what the reader thinks. I was also thinking about movies quite a lot – no particular movie, but just the genre of movies in general, and how that mind-reading aspect must work differently when we, the viewers, do not have an author or narrator there to tell us about the character’s thoughts. Same thing with an extremely complicated and mysterious TV show like Lost, in which most of the characters are liars, incidentally. We obviously do get some pleasure out of being able to read character’s minds; much of the fun of Lost involves reading not only people's minds but also their environment (another slight disappointment: Zunshine only really focused on how we read people). But I think that the role this "mind-reading" plays in our actual enjoyment of fiction differs in significance depending on both the story and the medium in which it’s told.

For example, several years ago when the more recent film version of Pride & Prejudice came out (the one with Keira Knightley), a good friend of mine said that she didn’t think the movie did the book justice because, in the book, we could be in Elizabeth’s mind. Rather than just seeing her wander the halls of Pemberley and look around in amazement, in the book we knew all about what she was observing in the house, what she thought of it all, what amazed her, how it all related in her mind to her previous rejection of Mr. Darcy, and all the mixed emotions that thus went along with those jumbled thoughts. While I personally like the fact that films can leave even more room open to interpretation of a character’s actions because of this lack of insight into their minds, there’ve been many times that I’ve heard similar complaints about movies that are based off of books. People who have read the books don’t being outside the character’s minds in film… It’s not always like that, of course, but I’ve heard it enough that I think it’s significant.

In fact, the ways people respond to the translation of a novel to a film would be an interesting topic of study in cognitive theory. And then there's the question of who we ascribe the "source-tag" to in a film or game or any non-book medium? Films, games, TV shows, etc, don't really have authors the way that books do. While some directors have their names closely associated with their films - Tim Burton, Steven Spielberg, M. Night Shyamalan, Hayao Miyazaki - and so, I guess, attempt to create a similar kind of author-text relationship, usually even then it's not the same. So when it comes to the question of our "metarepresentation" of fiction as fiction, do the dynamics change? I think they do, but how significant the change is, I can't say.

I’m not sure what my point was there. I don’t think I had a point, actually. It was just something I was thinking about, and I wish that Zunshine had talked about it a little bit.

But, otherwise, I liked this book quite a lot. J

Theory of Mind: Revolutionary for Literature or Just Intriguing?

Cognitive theory in literature is hot, or at least new and still sparkly: the New York Times recently ran an article about how cognitive theory supports the idea that humans are wired for narrative, and I’ve been looking forward to Zunshine’s book as an overview to a field I know nothing about, other than hearing my sister, who is a professor in memory and cognitive psychology, talk about “source memory problems.”

Now that I’ve read Zunshine’s “lucid overview of the most exciting area of research in contemporary cognitive psychology,” I’ve been mulling over a response, yet I’m still not sure what I think about this book.  For the first section, I found myself increasingly frustrated and mystified (this is all there is too this? So what!). Then Zunshine began discussing unreliable narrators (103), and the book suddenly seemed much more useful.  In the end, I was confused again. The back blurb by Uri Margolin promises, “Zunshine proved beyond doubt that even the more conservative literary student who just wants a better reading or understanding of a specific novel stands to gain considerably by adopting the cognitive outlook and vocabulary she suggests.” I’m still not sure what I think about that yet, either. In this response, I hope to articulate the hazy thoughts that reoccurred during my reading.

Zunshine develops a meticulous case arguing that we need these various cognitive tools (ToM/mindreading and metarepresentation) in order to understand the fiction we read (61-65). She talks about how our textual interpretations “will certainly be structured by our metarepresentational ability” (74). She argues that every single one of our interpretations is underlain by our cognitive makeup (100).  As someone who is new to the field, I’ll take her at her word that she is correctly interpreting and applying the latest cognitive research.  Our biology underlies everything we do on a daily basis, so it doesn’t surprise me that our cognitive psychology underlies all of our interpretations.

My question lies more when we take these recognitions and apply them as a theory or as an interpretive lens.  Here ToM seems to be different from, say, gender or queer theory.  One reason might be that your basic cognitive makeup is set—while different texts challenge your ToM in different ways (such as detective novels versus Mrs. Dalloway), your ToM seems like it would remain the same.  In the end, doesn’t that limit the intrigue of cognitive theory? Once you get past the initial, “ooh let’s see what cognitive buttons are firing when reading this text,” isn’t there a critical lack of a “so what”?  If you interpret a text through a feminist lens to examine gender, I think part of what makes those interpretations worthwhile and interesting is that gender is neither fixed nor innate. Gender is partially culturally-constructed, so your analysis may reveal something vital about an author or time period.  There is also the possibility of change—I think this can be an important motivation for why people study subjects like gender or postcolonialism.  We can see how embedded a certain attitude was or unearth hidden assumptions, which makes it possible to hone in on those attitudes and assumptions to see if we agree with them or to suggest a reform. There is no reforming our ToM, however.  Yes, we can read more consciously to be aware of how a text is playing off of our cognitive abilities, or as writers we can attempt to consciously play with our readers’ abilities, but aren’t you fundamentally playing with a set of cards that has long since been dealt (the general ToM abilities of the human)?  Not that all theories or schools have to be revolutionary (or even offer something new) but I think by definition a revolution means change, and I don’t see that possibility in what Zunshine lays out.  I mean, I see a change in our awareness, but not the ability to fundamentally change that which we are being made aware of.

I had worked myself up into quite a lather by the time I hit Zunshine’s discussion of unreliable narrators (starting around 103).  The text takes a turn toward craft, and I immediately perked up.  Here, for me, lies whatever version of “so what” that Zunshines offers.  Zunshine analyzes Nabokov’s strategy for making Humbert Humbert sympathetic, showing how Nabokov distributes Humbert’s thoughts through multiple minds in the narrative.  Sources are introduced and removed quickly, before the reader has a chance to evaluate trustworthiness (104). Nabokov makes the same narrator both reliable and unreliable by splitting the narrative into past and present tense, and taking advantage of readers’ metarepresentational capacities to read such time tags (114). These are just a few examples that I found very helpful, both as a reader and writer.  Here Zunshine took a step down from the overarching cognitive setup of humans to look at individual texts.  From my rudimentary understanding, it seems like this is where cognitive literary theory will be most useful, on a craft level to show what makes an individual text effective.

            This does not quite bring me to agree, however, with Zunshine’s statement, “I can say that I personally read fiction because it offers a pleasurable and intensive workout for my Theory of Mind” (164).  I guess I can now say that I like having my ToM tickled, but what about the engagement with characters and emotions and themes? Zunshine tries to proactively head off such comments, saying, for example, “how do you separate our ToM and emotions?” (163).  This is a good point—as discussed above, our cognitive abilities underlie much of how we see the world, and are likely hopelessly entangled with our emotions.  But to say that the purpose of fiction is basically to exercise readers’ brains (99) is a very inward look at fiction.  It assumes that everything I do ultimately is all about me.  And while this might be true—all of us, on a biological level, are hardwired to be our own command central—I like to think that one of the reasons I read fiction is to take me out of my own brain and whisk me off to other worlds, to help me imagine something other than my self.  This is why ultimately I think cognitive literary theory may simply be intriguing, not revolutionary like perhaps Marxism or postcolonialism.  Sometimes when I read I don’t want to just be pleasurably worked out; I want to have the rug pulled out from underneath me, to see for a moment the possibility of an entirely different world or to be another person and see the world through someone else’s eyes.

After Theory... Then what?

This book was quite an enjoyable read. Eagleton reminded me of Graff in several obvious ways: first of all, his critique of the elitist view of academia and intellectualism; second, the fact that he was able to articulate fairly complicated ideas in an accessible and amusing way. I found Eagleton much more amusing than Graff, of course. Most of Eagleton’s humor, I noticed (again, not a very deep observation, but something I noticed), comes from his use of strange or unexpected metaphors to explain his ideas. He does this well, and most of them succeed at being comical as well as holding up logically. He perhaps resorted to metaphors a little too much – sometimes it seemed like he was doing it in every other sentence – but for the most part, it was consistently engaging and very intelligent.

I found, thinking about the book after reading it, that the whole thing seemed to sort of morph into a kind of blob in my mind. Eagleton’s chapter titles were slightly deceiving, as often I felt he just went off on tangents or rambled through whatever subject happened to be relevant at the time (for instance, thinking back on the chapter “Gains and Losses,” I really couldn’t tell you what the titular gains and losses for cultural theory were; I guess towards the end of the chapter it became more clear, but for the most part it seemed like a general overview of cultural theory’s problems and critics…). I was surprised by how philosophical the book was, particularly towards the end in the discussions of morality, evil, “non-being,” etc. Those ending chapters were the most difficult, and also the most interesting to me. I’m going to have to go back and read through those again more carefully, I think.

It seems Eagleton is calling for a new era of criticism, or at least a new wave of fresh ideas. Maybe this is oversimplifying it a bit – in fact, no, not maybe. I know I’m oversimplifying. But that was the general impression I got: he’s criticizing postmodernism quite a lot, and also criticizing those critics out there who are resorting to shallow sensationalist kinds of topics to write about – or seem to be stuck in old ideas that aren’t really as relevant or useful any more (whatever “useful” means). Although I found I agreed with a lot of his points, and I was appreciative of the fact that he rarely resorted to a black-and-white kind of mindset, I guess I felt a little cheated or skeptical by the end. It’s easy to point out problems and say, “This needs to be fixed. Somebody fix it.” But actually fixing it is not necessarily a simple matter of noticing the problem and talking about it. Especially in a field like literary criticism, I’m not even sure that coming up with “something new” is something that critics should be really even trying to do consciously. At least, not just for the sake of coming up with something new. It seems to me that new ideas arise out of certain circumstances; and if the circumstances aren’t right, trying to force it will just lead to failure. Not that I believe that the great thinkers of the past weren’t aware that they were doing something new, or even doing it purposefully; but doing something “new” wasn’t necessarily the point, or they had the material to make that new thing good in its own right (not good just because it was new).

I guess I’m skeptical of the proposal to come up with new ideas, not only because coming up with “new” ideas is a lot easier said than done, of course (in fact, I doubt there is even such thing as “new” ideas), but because it seems like that valuing of newness is a symptom of capitalism, which is ironic considering what a Marxist Eagleton is. Thinking of our own culture, there’s such a pressure to find the next new thing, to always be pumping out more and more new stuff. I think that mindset has carried over even into the humanities, which like to think of themselves as separate from all that. But thinking about my experience in the art world as an undergrad, and as a writer as well, so often it seems that it doesn’t matter whether a work of art is really “good” – whatever that means, moving, meaningful, I don’t know – but people will declare it good merely for the fact that it’s something new. I think this obsession with newness is something that’s obviously not new at all. But I do think that it’s been intensified by our consumer-centered, entertainment-driven society.

So, I suppose I’m not totally on board with the proposition that we all go out and try to come up with a new theory – not unless there is a real need for it, besides the need to have something new. That’s all I’ve got to say.

Thoughts on Eagleton

As I read through After Theory, I began to wonder a few things about the text and about my response to it – not my calculated, intellectual response to the book, but my visceral, gut reaction to the text. There’s something very appealing about what Eagleton is saying, and I wanted to explore why it is that there’s something so pleasurable about seeing him take potshots at the theoretical talking heads that we’ve been studying throughout this semester. And I think that the answer that I’ve come up with is that Eagleton appeals to me because he is trying to make theory matter again.

I read this book not necessarily as having it out for postmodernism, trying to debunk Derrida or Focucault – but I see Eagleton as appealing to the students of their theories, pleading with them to apply their critical faculties to real problems we endure in our daily lives. He sees postmodernism as reveling in the study of popular culture, sexuality, feminism, and colonized populations without aim for real world repurcussions. I think that his position can be boiled down to the fact that most of postmodern academic study is built around play – a kind of play which is of course intellectual stimulating, but politically and socially de-fanged.  Most of this can be best summed up in the following quote:

Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver.  It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness…It is also, as we have suggested before, rather an awkward moment in history to find oneself with little or nothing to say about such fundamental questions. (101-2)

In essence, we could say that Eagleton doesn’t necessarily have any beef with cultural theory on a fundamental level – but rather has a problem with the way that it is being conducted as of late. I don’t think the methods are at question here, but the ends those methods are moving towards.  It seems that Eagleton puts a finger on the fact that even if academics disregard grand narratives in favor of a kind of postmodern pluralism it will not stop grand narratives from being developed. The grand narrative of Islamic Fundamentalism might be one. And if academics do not play a part in discussing the fundamental issues at play in these grand narratives the narratives will go on nonetheless, and the inevitable promulgation of disastrous political and economic paradigms will, perhaps, go unchecked.

            One of other main questions I had while reading Eagleton’s text is whether or not the ‘absence’ of theorists in the political sphere has some repercussion on the composition classroom. Thinking back to Graff’s text we read earlier in the semester, it would seem that Eagleton might have some critiques of Graff available. I am thinking, in this respect, of Graff’s idea that composition can be taught on any subject. Teachers of composition, whether they employ Graff’s model or not, are increasingly bringing cultural studies and popular culture into the classroom in ways that perhaps form the academics that they will eventually become – ones who, in Eagleton’s words “huddle diligently in libraries, at work on sensationalist subjects like vampirism and eye-gouging, cyborgs and porno movies.”

            I guess the question here is how much of what Eagleton identifies as the deficiencies of theory have permeated, through periphery and cross-doctrinal influence, into others areas of study? Does postmodernism influence all the way down to the composition classroom, where it is now entrenched?

Also, I found a great hour-long lecture online where Eagleton is talking about some similar ideas to the ones he writes about in After Theory. Check it out.

It’s All Relative, Sort of

Amy Marsh

As an undergraduate, I took a class on Buddhist philosophy from a visiting professor who spent more than a decade as a Buddhist monk before all the meditating on his knees led to massive knee surgery and a switch in professional course.  The class remains one of my personal foundations.  On the first day, our professor posed the dilemma that if Buddhism is considered non-dualistic (thus taking a relativistic approach by not distinguishing between “good” and “bad” or seeing the world in binaries), then how is it possible to have Buddhist ethics?  If all phenomena are interconnected, how can you judge anything as absolutely unacceptable?  Our professor distinguished between what he called “California Zen,” which he posited as a wishy-washy “everything is equal” relativism lacking an ethical edge, and more traditional Zen traditions. Throughout the semester, we developed metaphors as a way to approach this question.  I don’t have the time or recollection here to recreate that entire process, but the short of it is that many Buddhist philosophers do see a way for Buddhism to make moral decisions (“this is bad”) even while engaging in a very relativistic philosophy.  You could try to quickly summarize this as resulting from “big mind” versus “little mind” or  “Truth” versus “truth.”

As I type this up, I realize I am doing a very unconvincing job of laying out how this is possible, but I think that I will leave that alone for now, as I think my point here is more that I believe this is possible, and that this is what I have meant by “relativism.”  Reading Terry Eagleton’s After Theory, I realized that I have often used such words in a loose and inaccurate way.  Or maybe this not just laxness on my part, but also a matter of how terms get used differently in different fields or contexts.

When I used the word “relativism,” I generally meant it more in the sense that there is often not one truth, not that (absolute) truth is not possible.  (It is true that I have class tonight, and I had better finish my response.  But, as Eagleton points out, this is an example of banal absolute truth.  When I talk relativism versus absolute truth, I am usually referring to something different—say, the general black/white George Bush approach to truth versus a nuanced shades of grey let’s understand the context and at least try to look at it from multiple perspectives sort of approach.  There might be multiple (absolute) truths, in the sense that there are a lot of true things out there in the world. (Tomorrow, for example, will be Tuesday, and I will have a response for a different class due. That is also “true.”) This is not to dismiss what Eagleton was saying, but to point out that I think this discussion over relativism can mean multiple things. (Now how’s that for relativistic! Although I think it is also [absolutely?] true.

In my anthropology and religion theory classes, we often talked about relativism in the sense of having more than one tool in a tool box, and Eagleton also discusses this concept.  Eagleton, before he gets around to dismantling relativism, says that one of cultural theory’s achievements is to disabuse us of the “idea that there is a single correct way to interpret a work of art” (95).  After reading Eagleton’s discussions of relativism, Absolute Truth, objectivity, etc I never really felt myself disagreeing with him, but just feel like I am sloppy with my terms and my thinking, a matter that should certainly be cleaned up, but this is different from a fundamental revisioning.

Did I just write a completely wishy-washy response, or was there some kind of actual point in there?  These things seem clear when you start out, but by the time you’ve held them up to the light and taken a theoretical stab or two, it all starts seeming blurred. 

Which perhaps might be a decent transition to Eagleton’s work as a whole. I appreciated his early chapters, which helped provide context and a historical background and evolution for many of the theories we have discussed in class. I felt like Eagleton provided some depth to the discussion in the way that Bressler never has for me.  The last few chapters, however, take on a very different tone as Eagleton seeks to establish an afterlife of theory.  While I found many of his discussions, such as on morality, interesting, I also caught myself stopping mid-chapter with the astonished realization, “This is a literature theory book!”  I sometimes struggled to see the relevancy to theory. 

I also struggled a bit to see what exactly Eagleton was offering that is so different that it challenges the existing orthodoxy of the field.  Is it just a matter that you can’t separate the ethical and political, and that fundamentalism is creeping back in? That you need to be able to say that something is “true” while also being able to distinguish between “Truth” and “truth”?  This book helped me understand existing theories much better—his discussion on Marxism, for example, addressed the elephant in the corner, which is that many of these theories can seem passé, but then goes on to show, I think, how Marxism is still a useful tool in the toolbox. Very helpful.  But as to what’s next? What’s “after theory?”  I am still struggling to see how Eagleton offers something fundamentally new.  

"A Man Who Cannot Get Out of Bed in the Morning Without a hand from God and Karl Marx"

Charles Frost

            I'm reminded of what Alla said towards the end of last week's class with concerns to Theory--that scholars must begin to turn their focus to fundamentalist religion. Alla also mentioned that the academics/intellectuals were surprised that religion, in America and in the Middle East, has returned to the public sphere.. I'm surprised that religion has been playing such a prominent role in politics and world events. It seems natural to me. The extreme religious are already changing academia. After Theory (After Marx seems like a good title, too) is that response; the tools that we currently have do not adequately prepare us to navigate their terrain.

            Without the events of the last ten years, the discussion of (absolute) truth doesn't seem like it would have occurred so soon. Only with an agreed to term of what truth and the purpose of humans could the Left hope to communicate with the other side. Eventually, we probably would have returned to this idea. The framework for this discussion has already been set by those outside of academia and the institutions is now reacting. Is it reactionary?

            Following the idea that the framework has been preset by the fundamentalists: Anthropologist Susan Harding suggests that conversion is a two step process where people enter the "membrane of belief" where they absorb the language and mannerisms of a religious community. I have the feeling that it doesn't matter what type of a community it is. The first step begins to frame the thought process of the individual, something similar to understanding why the community does certain things. The next step is passing out of the "membrane of unbelief." The idea is that the first step happens unconsciously and makes it easier to entertain the idea of making a conscious choice to convert. Maybe this is what I experienced here at this institution.

            I'm not really concerned with the radical Islamic factions and customs. There is a huge chasm between western culture and the mid-east that the practice of mutilating female genitalia, stoning for women for "sins", and forcing them to wear Burkas would never come into style. The idea that this vein of religion will undermine our cultural ideas of human rights to the point where it changes us fundamentally seems unlikely. I'm much more concerned with western cultural religious heritage, the dangers seem subtler in contrast. There is a misconception that evangelical Christianity reaches back through the ages to find purity in a closer reading of the Bible. The present religious community is a step-sibling of postmodernism; the parent that they share is the cultural trauma of the twentieth century.

            I suppose the point is that Christianity, as Karen Armstrong asserts (in the The Battle for God), has been recovering from the one of the first historical criticism of the Bible that was published a few years after The Origin of the Species. It wasn't until the early 1900s in America that Christians began to combat evolution in the court system. Then there was the atomic bomb and Billy Graham came out onto the scene: judgment by fire. Then Francis Schaeffer in the mid to late 1970s, with the help of his son, infused politics into the American religious right (Crazy for God) with their revisionist video series, How Should We Then Live? They interpreted history through the lens of evangelicalism. At the end of the series they introduced the immorality of abortion and soon became a large voting bloc. Other issues were also divided into red and blue.

            unChristian, a book written by Cuningham, Kinaman, and Lyons who work at Christian polling organization The Barna Group, state that the Culture War has been lost. I forget the exact numbers, but the authors whittle evangelical Christians down to 30% of those claiming to follow Christian religion in America. However, they also assert that more Americans are coming into contact with Christianity than before. Considering the current election, I'm not sure that the Barna Group is right. There's a resurgence in the Culture War. Some people call it death throes, but I think that's wishful thinking on their part. It will be interesting to see what  happens when Dobson, Colson, Robertson, Franklin Graham, Hybels, LaHaye and others that rose to prominence from the 1980s pass on. I'm not very familiar with the up and coming generation of ministers and charlatans, but mostly they are offspring of the already powerful. I'm not sure that they will be a coherent group after the fathers pass.

            I see connections between evangelicals and academia. After our class discussion on incest, I'm seeing that all that we do in the humanities is discuss morality. We just don't use that word. Objective Reality means god, truth, and empiricism. Norms and normative are the words we use to say "morals." Existentialism is the term we use to discuss our fear of death, secret considerations of afterlife (some people don't, I acknowledge that), and purpose of existence. We use quotes from others to give credit, but also to displace ownership of ideas we accept but do not really want to be associated with. The Canon is our scripture. I know I don't belong with the church, but sometimes I'm not sure if I belong here either (once a Jesus freak, you're always a freak).

            As a community we are hyper-aware of the consequences of passing value judgments. The meta-ethical considerations that hovers at the edges of our classroom conversations paralyze our ability to come to a conclusion. For example; the "bad" or "evil" practice of cutting up girl's genitals. Or serial killers. Or exploitation. Or child rape. Maybe even petty workplace politics that disrupt peoples' lives should belong on the list. I do agree with Heyne that our culture allows us to express evil thoughts in how we wish to torture or punish these people. I don't think lableing something evil means we respond in an equal fashion of brutality. I feel comfortable in the ability to categorize these activates with a term that expresses my evaluation of these actions. I think Eagleton would agree with me to a point. I don't believe that "evil" is a metaphysical substance, these are natural actions occurring in the natural world.

            I did enjoy the portions where Eagleton discusses Biblical text. I felt like I was in familiar waters. The reliance on Marx troubled me a little but that could very well be my capitalist subconscious. I would like to see what would happen if Eaglton would have placed the last four pages on his book in the beginning. I'm not sure I would classify him as bitter, but this feels like a book written by an old man who just wants to speak his mind.