Abstract: Obenland, Frank. Providential Fictions: Nathaniel Hawthorne's Secular Ethics. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh, 2011. 306 pp. EUR 39.90 paper. American art is all essentially moral, claims D.H. Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature, and yet, as his remarks about perfect of Scarlet Letter suggest, for him novel's power resides in ways in which it resists conventional moral making (171, 99). Over years, critics and readers have reveled in duplicity of Hawthorne's fiction, particularly in its refusal to be reduced to single system of moral and ethical meaning. They have invented and reinvented his fiction, prompted by its interpretive elusiveness to construct an array of responses that range from celebrating his fiction as reaffirming Christian ethic, to interpreting it as ambiguous, indeterminate, and even beyond meaning. Frank Obenland's Providential Fictions: Nathaniel Hawthorne's Secular Ethics enters into difficult terrain of this critical conversation about meaning, morals, and ethics armed with deep theoretical understanding and an impressive knowledge of decades of Hawthorne scholarship to argue that Hawthorne's fiction reveals and literary ethic and to challenge readers to become aware of their responsibility for others as well as for their own (self-) interpretative acts (13). In book's Introduction, Obenland lays out terms of his argument. He weds theory of early Mikhail Bakhtin with Charles Taylor's ethical theory to establish suppositions about Hawthorne's literary ethics. He argues that Bakhtin's account of self's encounter with otherness is helpful in assessing Hawthorne's fiction. According to Obenland, Bakhtin insists on giving priority to experiencing self in aesthetic and ethical events (28), self similar to individual in Charles Taylor's ethical system who must make a crucial set of qualitative distinctions (qtd. in Obenland 31). Hawthorne's tales and novels, read in spirit of Taylor and Bakhtin, are sites for articulating and for contending oppositional moral perspectives (32) that do not bring readers to single orthodox, absolutist position but may lead them to understand and appreciate difficulties and strengths of competing positions that characterize society. Obenland uses and in both expected and unexpected ways in this study. He acknowledges range of meanings concepts have traditionally held in American religion and politics but argues that Hawthorne develops revised language of (35). primary features of Obenland's conceptual map of Hawthorne's providentialism are agnostic, secular, and dialogic (36). Hawthorne who emerges is Romantic infused with dash of postsecular modernity (16). Obenland draws on Charles Taylor's A Secular Age to characterize modern era as one in which religious beliefs were challenged but secular worldview did not displace religious; two co-exist. Hawthorne's fiction is characterized by this same permeability between religious and secular (34). To support his thesis, Obenland presents series of interpretations of Hawthorne's tales and major romances informed by discussions of social, religious, and political ideas of era. In his readings of three early tales in Chapter 1, he delves into what he describes as the ethics of reading or aesthetic, principles of which were promulgated in American literary journals of 1820s and 1830s (46-7). Unitarian writers and commentators who popularized this ethical aesthetic believed that literature could aid an individual's moral development by acknowledging absolute religious and moral beliefs. Hawthorne challenges this monological providential aesthetic in such stories as Roger Malvin's Burial, The Gentle Boy, and The Minister's Black Veil with his pluralistic ethics of reading (48). …
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-09-22
Language: en
Type: article
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