Description
Book SynopsisHow do we stand in relation to everything that comes down to us from the past? Is the very idea of tradition still useful in the wake of historical ruptures, such as the Holocaust, changes in the canon, and the end of colonialism? The concept of tradition has gained renewed importance in recent cultural studies. Suspicion of tradition as culturally narrow and oppressive is a persistent theme of modernity and has increased lately with the resurgence of religious traditionalism around the globe. At the same time, various groups demanding recognition for their distinctive cultural identity have reclaimed their traditions. Philosophers from Josiah Royce and Hans-Georg Gadamer to Alasdair MacIntyre have explored the relations between tradition and themes such as freedom, community, self-assertion, originality, and the shared values and interpretations that constitute everyday life. The essays in this volume offer varying, even disparate analyses of religious, literary, and cultural tradit
Trade ReviewIn this delightfully angular collection, Donald Marshall conducts a conversation with insightful interlocutors in such creatively dialectical fashion as to press into the tough hermeneutical issues and yet simultaneously offer fresh readings of certain accomodatingly resilient texts. This is a conversation deeply indebted to tradition, yet which challenges and extends our appreciation of how tradition works when it works, as also how it ossifies, atrophies or collapses in upon itself when it fails the test of apparent contradiction. Marshall's own excursus upon Plato's introduction to such matters in the Symposium is a brilliant harbinger of very good critical reflection to come in the subsequent essays. -- David Lyle Jeffrey, Provost and Distinguished Professor of Literature and Humanities, Baylor University
Without sparing the rod of intellectual rigor, this is a sympathetic and broad-ranging anthology of essays renewing and complicating the concept of tradition from Plato to Gadamer and beyond. The editor adds an exemplary introduction. -- Geoffrey Hartman, Sterling Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature, Yale University
Table of ContentsChapter 1 Introduction: The Force of Tradition Chapter 2 Tradition and the Terror of History: Christianity, the Holocaust, and the Jewish Theological Dilemma Chapter 3 Charity Militant: Gadamer, Davidson, and Post-Critical Hermeneutics Chapter 4 "In the Chorus of Others": M. M. Bakhtin's Sense of Tradition Chapter 5 The Role of the Kuhnian Paradigm in Tradition and Originality Chapter 6 Walking vs. Flying: Kierkegaard on Tradition and the Moral Import of Literature Chapter 7 My Own Private New England: Tradition, the Self, and the State in Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World Chapter 8 Holy Fire: Biblical Radicalism in the Narratives of Jarena Lee and Zilpha Elaw Chapter 9 ESTESE and Doblado: Coleridge, Blanco White, and the Church of Rome Chapter 10 Jane Eyre and the Tradition of Self-Assertion; or Bronte's Socialization of Schiller's "Play Aesthetic" Chapter 11 Tradition and Liberation: A Critique of German Cultural Modernity in Heinrich Böll and Hans-Georg Gadamer Chapter 12 Community, Text, and Tradition in The French Lieutenant's Woman Chapter 13 Storytellers and Interpreters in Achebe Chapter 14 Contributors
