Mormon Literaturstreit echoes and Bookshop registry
Hello. Happy All Hallow’s eve eve eve!
Two quick updates on what I’m working on:
I’m making slow but important progress on the SF novella about the Mormon artist who is commissioned to create a memorial for the site of a major space disaster. Because it incorporates aesthetic theory, I’m finding I need some time to work through each chapter in my head so that the various narrative timelines and whatever aesthetic topic are being intertwined develop, not so much in concrete ways as emotional ones. It’s not my usual approach to writing even if the end result is very much in the vein of the fiction I’ve written so far.
Related to the above, I’ve begun writing the next post in my ongoing project to document and grapple with attempts at Mormon aesthetics. It’ll be on modernism and Mormonism and an essay by Gerritt de Jong Jr. on modernity in art. I’m hoping to finish and publish it in time to include a link in the November newsletter.
Now on to the main courses:
AMV bookshop registry
I’ve created an AMV bookshop registry, which allows you to buy me a book that I’m interested in but that either doesn’t fit in my budget for books (please, academic presses, at the very least offer non-DRMed discount ebook versions a year or so after the title is published) or is a book I’d like to read but isn’t a major priority for my “cultural stuff budget” right now.
If you buy one of the books on the registry, it will be sent to me, and I’ll read it and write something about it. A percentage of the sale will go to supporting BCC Press.
There are many other ways you could and should spend your money, including much more important causes, so this is not something I’m going to keep bugging you about (other than a link at the bottom of each newsletter).
I created the registry simply because there are some books that interest me, and I already subsidize what I do here and elsewhere out of my household budget. The modest revenue I make from book and story sales goes straight back into funding my creative and lit crit activities.
This also doesn’t mean that I refuse to buy those books myself. Some of them may disappear from the registry from time-to-time because I’ve moved them into the “purchase with my own money” category.
So if you see a title you’d really like me to write about, and truly have the funds, and feel strongly it’s best used to subsidize Mormon Studies work by me, then the AMV Bookshop registry exists for you.
Titles are roughly in the order of my interest in them. I also welcome suggestions of titles to add to the list.
Mormon Literaturstreit: an unintentional echo from Richard D. Rust?
Only one AMV post this month—this first of a series of what I’m calling echoes of the Mormon Literaturstreit. This one features the talk Virtuous, Lovely, or of Good Report’ Thoughts on a Latter-day Saint Literary Criticism, given by UNC-Chapel Hill literature professor Richard D. Rust at the Literature and Belief Colloquium held March 1995 at BYU.
Brief Summary
Rust appears to not be well-acquainted with previous work done on Mormon literary criticism, including the Mormon Literaturstreit, even though he invokes Hugh Nibley’s Mantic/Sophic in much the same way BYU Professor Richard Cracroft did in the Literaturstreit proper. Rust is concerned with post-secularism and both art and criticism he doesn’t view as “virtuous, lovely, or of good report”, including queer readings of 19th century literature. He also doesn’t exhibit any awareness of any actual Mormon literature or literary criticism, which is not unusual in the history of people talking about Mormon art, but limits how interesting his approach is. What value there is in Rust’s remarks are his three principles for the Mormon literary critic and one other idea (which I’ll cover below).
The three principles are:
The LDS critic creates criticism that is inspired because it is based on study and faith.
The LDS critic seeks after “the good, the true, and the beautiful–another way of putting the thirteenth Article of Faith.”
The LDS critic has an obligation to make their work available to others.
Unfortunately, Rust doesn’t go into much detail on this process or, what would be even better, give specific details of work that accomplishes all three principles. Granted, it was a short talk and because the topic was new to him, he felt the need to do a lot of set up for it. But I’m especially interested in how he saw his last point as working. How would the LDS critic reach an audience? Is that audience only active members of the LDS Church? If not, what would it look like to take criticism that is inspired and seeks after the elements found in the thirteenth Article of Faith to non-LDS audiences?
Key Quote
“The words ‘critic’ and ‘criticism’ have root meanings of ‘discernment,’ ‘decision,’ and ‘judgment.’ Criticism involves the ‘analysis, interpretation, evaluation, and classification of literary works, or, in Matthew Arnold’s words, ‘a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.’”
Why It’s Important
Because I don’t think it’s a concept I’ve seen come up in Mormon literary criticism before. It does come up in Mormon aesthetics as a tool by which you should choose which works of art you allow yourself and your family to consume. And in one sense, what Rust is saying in the quote is a syllogistic criticism is criticism (even if he attaches the Matthew Arnold definition at the end).
But discernment has extra resonance in Mormonism. It’s one of the gifts of the Spirit. It invokes the idea of not just judging, but also of seership, of seeing things others might not be able to. Overly lofty goals for Mormon criticism, perhaps. And yet there is a sense in which good literary criticism allows us to see things about the world that we wouldn’t be able to otherwise.
One thing we don’t see enough in Mormon criticism—and this is probably a byproduct of so much Mormon criticism being concerned with the meta-task of defining the field of Mormon literature—is the kind of criticism that links fictional narratives to important social, cultural, political, and historical narratives as a way to examine, interrogate, and shed light on important, interesting, troubling moments, trends, ideas, etc. When found in Mormonism, such work tends to be more devotional or nonfiction writing.
There are limits to what such literary criticism can do, of course. And much of what has been done in the larger world of literary criticism is exactly the kind of work Rust decries in his essay. But I think there’s not just room, but a need for Mormon literary criticism that seeks to discern something about the world. So much Mormon discourse lacks, frankly, substance, grounding, and imagination.
Ships of Hagoth engages in this kind of work but mostly focused on Mormon criticism of art that does not come out of the Mormon tradition.
And I suppose I make the same mistake as so many before by focusing so much of what I do at AMV, especially recently, on the meta-project of Mormon literature, reserving what little discernment I may possess for my fiction writing.
The problem with discernment is that it not only takes inspiration, it take time—a lot of it.
Judging art is easy.
Discerning it—truly perceiving it—is difficult.
See you next month!
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