Brooke’s “Freud’s Masterplot” • Plotting and narrative are central to our world, and the

discourse of plot is discourse of reality.

• Reading for plot not a bad thing—it appeals to our internal

logic

• The heroes of narratives are moving toward desire,

projecting the self onto the world.

• Narrative desire is, therefore, ultimately, “desire for the

end.”

• “All narration is obituary in that life acquires definable

meaning only at, and through, death” (1163).

• Narrative, then, is “repetition” (1165) in order to make plot.

• How is this different from Deconstruction?

• Metonymy is, the rhetorical figure by which one names something by turning

to something adjacent in space or time, for example, "the crown has

spoken" in place of "the king has spoken" or "the pen is mightier than the

sword.”

• It is like the syntax of a sentence. We can read because we understand

verbs, subjects, etc

• Metaphor brings together disparate elements into a single unity

• In other words, it ties up our loose ends.

• We think of plot, and often our lives, as the tension between metonymy and

metaphor.

• Frankenstein’s monster begins with birth and proceeds towards death. His

artificial life is a “real life,” is it not, because he reads a plot? He is,

therefore, human?

Repetition

• Freud argues that repetition allows us to

comprehend trauma, and that repetition is the

“movement from passivity to mastery” (1164).

• We need to repeat, instead of simply remember,

so as to see painful past material as the present

(1164). It is this desire that creates plot.

• How do the Frankenstein and the monster

employ repetition?

Closure

• Is death the desire for

closure?

• Frankenstein dies in

the novel. Does the

monster?

• How does reading

stimulate or reflect

desire?

• HERMENEUTIC AND

PROAIRETIC CODES

• The two ways of creating

suspense in narrative

• The first caused by

unanswered question

• The second by the

anticipation of an action's

resolution

Mid-Semester Checkup

• How has the frequently secular position of

literary theory affected your relationship to

literature?

• What has changed for you since 404 in

this regard over the past few weeks?

• Is there a particular theory that you take

to, or find disruptive?

• Take 3 min.

Mid-Semester Checkup

• How has the frequently secular position of

literary theory affected your relationship to

literature?

• What has changed for you since 404 in

this regard over the past few weeks?

• Take 3 min.

• How can we begin to think about our own

Christian scholarship in relation to secular

theory?

Some possibilities

• One common position is that Christian criticism is scholarship in

which the content of the inquiry is the distinguishing Christian

feature.

• Critics who practice this variety of criticism see it as their job to spell

out the themes, metaphors, and allusions in texts that are indebted

to Christianity.

• These scholars may defend such criticism on the grounds that

Christians need to guard the wealth of Christian history and texts

from marginalization in a secular academic setting often hostile to

Christian texts.

Some possibilities

• One common position is that Christian criticism is scholarship in

which the content of the inquiry is the distinguishing Christian

feature.

• Critics who practice this variety of criticism see it as their job to spell

out the themes, metaphors, and allusions in texts that are indebted

to Christianity.

• These scholars may defend such criticism on the grounds that

Christians need to guard the wealth of Christian history and texts

from marginalization in a secular academic setting often hostile to

Christian texts.

• However, you don’t need to be Christian to pursue this kind criticism.

Some possibilities

• Many such scholars follow the Reader Response

model, arguing that Christians construct different texts

when they read because of their Christianity.

• They like Stanley Fish who argued that interpretive

communities and their strategies of reading "exist prior

to the act of reading and therefore determine the

shape of what is read rather than, as is usually

assumed, the other way around" (171).

• For the Christian critic, Christianity functions as the

interpretive community so that by being a Christian the

reader constructs (writes) texts rather than

reconstructs them.

Marxism

• Marxism is concerned with the disenfranchised, the

worker, the proletariat, who is exploited to serve the

needs of the upper class.

• Faith is the salve given to poor so that they don’t revolt.

• “You shall not follow a crowd to do evil; nor shall you

testify in a dispute so as to turn aside after many to

pervert justice. You shall not show partiality to a poor

man in his dispute” (Exodus 23:2-3).

• “never does the Bible disavow capitalism, only its

impure application by corrupt participants” (Flax).

• We as Christians equalize wealth, but not by law.

Deconstruction

• It’s de-emphasis on the centre of meaning,

of a transcendental signified, stands in

direct opposition to our believe in God,

and sees our language of faith as porous.

• What do we do?

Gallagher and Lundin, Literature Through

the Eyes of Faith

• “Biblical standards of language, of

personhood, of right and wrong, of

interpretation, and of beauty must shape

our evaluation of all works of literature”

(136).

• “To the Christian seeking to understand

literature it is interesting to note that

modern ideas about art arose as the

cultural influence of Christianity began to

decline” (72)

The____________Reader

• Adjectives are often used to describe the

Christian reader, including “the charitable

reader” (Alan Jacobs 113) in order to

distinguish him or her from the secular

postmodern critic.

The____________Reader

• Adjectives are often used to describe the Christian

reader, including “the charitable reader” (Jacobs 113) in

order to distinguish him or her from the secular

postmodern critic.

• Others I have encountered:

– Mindful reader

– Charitable reader

– Discerning reader (Daniel Coleman, In Bed with the

Word)

– Thoughtful reader

The____________Reader

• Does adding the adjectives to “reader” drastically affect

its meaning?

• Do these new terms encourage you to read from a

perspective of faith, or are they simply variations of

“readers” described in other forms and theories?

• It is an anxiety of control, as Coleman claims on 51

• He also says that we must be free to explore a text’s possible

meanings.

• On 52 he calls it love

• 56 respect for the book

• 57-8 is a key passage for the Christian scholar

• Willingness to risk vulnerability (59)

Roy Clouser, “Myth of Religious

Neutrality” • “No theory can fail to be regulated by religion” (3).

• Clouser urges usto abandon vain efforts to harmonize

philosophical and scientific theories with belief in God

and embrace the ‘radically biblical’ claim that “there is

no knowledge or truth that is neutral with respect to

belief in God” (94).

• all humans, not just Christians, depend on either God or

a form of idol for their understanding of reality.

• If someone claims that something is necessary, then

real, then he or she has made a claim that is religious in

nature.

The monster as Adam

• How do we parallel

Adam’s story with the

monster’s story?

• Is our reading of the

monster contingent

upon a specific reading

of Adam and Eve?

• Is it a “return to origins,

or the repressed?”

(Brooke 1165).

• Krempe jokingly remarks that

Victor "believed in Cornelius

Agrippa as firmly as in the

gospel"

• Frankenstein doesn’t believe in

God. Does the monster

believe in God?

• What do we do with a monster

who repeatedly asks

theological questions: Who am

I? What am I? Where did I

come from?

• Paradise Lost is not the Bible,

but it does provide him with an

organized set of beliefs.

• The monster is the only

Christian in the novel, and is

not “seen,” or ignored, or

punished, even as he

confesses his sins.

• Yet his beliefs are from

literature and not the Bible. Is

this why his faith has no hope?

• His is a faith of literature, not

God?

•