| Paradigms and Perspectives develops a model for religious literary criticism derived from Kenneth Pike's tagmemic linguistic theory and Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic literary theory. Chapter One provides a taxonomy of twentieth century religious literary criticism categorized, according to foundational presuppositions and methodologies, as thematic, ethical, archetypal and secular-biblical.;Chapter Two traces the development of tagmemics and focusses on the four major theoretical constructs which have implications for the intertextuality of religion and literature, namely the priority of context, the emic/etic (inside/outside) distinction, the multiple perspectives of wave, particle and field, and the importance of observer bias.;Chapter Three juxtaposes the shared world views of tagmemics and dialogics expanding the linguistic orientation of tagmemics through the application of dialogics' literary framework and providing perspective on some of the pressing issues of contemporary literary theory, including reference and meaning, critical bias and relativism.;Chapter Four further develops the model in terms of tagmemic epistemology, theory, scholarship and criticism and revisits the taxonomy of Chapter One in order to explore the weaknesses of thematic, ethical, archetypal and secular-biblical criticism in light of the comparative strengths of tagmemics.;Chapter Five argues that tagmemics is a superior theoretical model for religious literary criticism because in its view of literature as communication it embraces the religious dimension of human behavior at many hierarchical levels, is context-sensitive, focusses on the particular without abandoning analytical criticism, encourages multiple critical perspectives without succumbing to relativism and argues for the possibility of "ordinary literary criticism" against postmodern attacks on foundationalism. In a reading of Henry James's Bostonians, contextual and textual issues are interwoven under the umbrella concept of literature as communication as the novel is examined in terms of its original, textual and catalytic communicative contexts, that is from the field, particle and wave perspectives. With this series of overlapping and spiraling analyses, a tagmemic reading is able to understand the important transitional character of The Bostonians as well as its ethical and narrative flaws, thus demonstrating how religious literary criticism can penetrate a novel which on its surface is blatantly non-religious. |
