Narrative, Religion, and Science

Fundamentalism Versus Irony, 1700-1999
Erscheinungsjahr 2010
ISBN: 978-0-521-00983-6
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 290 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 474 g

An increasing number of contemporary scientists, philosophers and theologians downplay their professional authority and describe their work as simply 'telling stories about the world'. If this is so, Stephen Prickett argues, literary criticism can (and should) be applied to all these fields. Such new-found modesty is not necessarily postmodernist scepticism towards all grand narratives, but it often conceals a widespread confusion and naïvety about what 'telling stories', 'description' or 'narrative', actually involves. While postmodernists define 'narrative' in opposition to the experimental 'knowledge' of science (Lyotard), some scientists insist that science is itself story-telling (Gould); certain philosophers and theologians even see all knowledge simply as stories created by language (Rorty; Cupitt). Yet story telling is neither innocent nor empty-handed. Prickett argues that since the eighteenth century there have been only two possible ways of understanding the world: the fundamentalist, and the ironic.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Prickett, Stephen

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturtheorie: Poetik und Literaturästhetik
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Geisteswissenschaften
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Wissenssoziologie, Wissenschaftssoziologie, Techniksoziologie
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: Arthur Dent, Screwtape, and the mysteries of story telling; 1. Post-modernism, grand narratives, and Just-So stories; 2. Newton and Kissinger: science as irony?; 3. Learning to say 'I': literature and subjectivity; 4. Reconstructing religion: fragmentation, typology and symbolism; 5. The ache in the missing limb: language, truth, and presence; 6. Twentieth-century fundamentalisms: theology, truth, and irony; 7. Science and religion: language, metaphor, and consilience; Concluding observational postscript: the tomb of Napoleon; Bibliography.

Über Autor(innen)

Prickett, Stephen
Stephen Prickett is Professor of English at Duke University, North Carolina. Prior to this he was Regius Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow. He took his BA at Cambridge (Trinity Hall) and subsequently did postgraduate work in Oxford (University College) and back in Cambridge, where he took his Ph.D. in 1968. Previous appointments include the Chair of English at the Australian National University in Canberra (1983-89), and teaching posts at the Universities of Sussex (England) (1967-82), Minnesota (1979-80), and Smith College, Massachusetts (USA) (1970-71). Aarhus University, Denmark (1997) and Singapore (1999). He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, former Chairman of the UK Higher Education Foundation, President of the European Society for the Study of Literature and Theology, and of the George MacDonald Society. He has published one novel, thirteen monographs, some seventy five articles on Romanticism, Victorian Studies and related topics, especially on literature and theology, including Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth (1970), Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (1976), Victorian Fantasy (1978), The Romantics (ed.) (1981), Words and the Word: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation (1986), Reading the Text: Biblical Criticism and Literary Theory (ed.) 1991, and Origins of Narrative: the Romantic Appropriation of the Bible (1996). He is also joint author (with Robert Barnes) of the volume on The Bible for the Cambridge University Press Landmarks of World Literature Series (1991), and joint editor (with Robert Carroll) of the Oxford University Press World's Classics Bible (1997) and (with David Jasper) of the new Blackwells Reader in Literature and Religion. (1999). He is General Editor of the Macmillan Romanticism in Perspective Series, and editorial consultant to the Oxford Bible Commentary Series and to Blackwells Bible Comment