Select Quotes From Select Christian Literary Critics

     While working on my doctorate, I did come to realize that a lover of a book is a very different creature than a critic of a book.  When I started reading the lovers, it became a delight to read both books and literary criticism.  Here are some quotes to spark your thinking about why and how we Christians read, and why and how we read through the lens of faith, hope, and love.  The critics operating according to the fruit of the Spirit are the best guides.  A few quotes below are not from Christian critics, but their sentiments are close to the Kingdom.

     Among scholars and critics of ‘primary narrative,’ it is widely recognized that the emergence to prominence of literary theory over ‘explication de texte,’ despite certain evident attractions, carries with it a disturbing proclivity to occlude the texts which were once, ostensibly, theory’s justification.  David Lyle Jeffrey People of the Book, 354.

     One thing, however, is certain: Reading can never die out among Christians.  This is because the whole Christian revelation centers around a Book.  God chose to reveal Himself to us in the most personal way through His Word—the Bible.  Gene Veith  Reading Between the Lines: A Christian Guide to Literature, 17.

     Among stamp collectors, letter-writers are not always welcome.  George Steiner  After Babel:  Aspects of Language and Translation. xi

     A growing problem is illiteracy—many people do not know how to read.  A more severe problem, though, is “aliteracy”—a vast number of people know how to read but never do it.  Gene Veith Reading Between the Lines: A Christian Guide to Literature, 25.

     As readers it is our task, as well as our delight, to enter that world (secondary literary world) with open eyes, accept it on its own merit, learn its rules and see its function.  James W. Sire How to Read Slowly: Reading for Comprehension, 93.

     The quest for meaning is like the desire for life, presence, survival against threatening encroachments of death, absence, annihilation.  Valentine Cunningham In the Reading Gaol: Postmodernity, Texts, and History, 13.

     Both items in this reading-writing transaction, the word and the world, exist only by courtesy of each other, because both consist, for the reader, in each other.  Valentine Cunningham In the Reading Gaol: Postmodernity, Texts, and History 11.

     The aim of a Great Book is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Russell Kirk Enemies of Permanent Things 41.

     The very phrase “humane letters” implies that literature is meant to teach us the character of human normality.  Russell Kirk Enemies of Permanent Things.

     In certain ways, the great novel and great poem can teach more of norms than can philosophy and theology.  Russell Kirk Enemies of the Permanent Things 51.

     Literature is meant to rouse and fortify the living, to renew the contract of eternal society.  Russel Kirk Enemies of the Permanent Things 2.

     Life is its own end—if one has a soul to tell him so.  Russell Kirk Enemies of the Permanent Things 11.

     The love of life burns brighter in Ray Bradbury than in any other man of letters.  Russell Kirk Enemies of the Permanent Things  120. (This is one among many reasons I love the fiction of Ray Bradbury)

    When called a moralist, Ray Bradbury accepts the impeachment willingly. Russell Kirk Enemies of the Permanent Things 121. (This is another reason I love the fiction of Ray Bradbury)

     The Christian view of language and its implied principles of literary theory are hardly then, pace Bloom and Derrida, bound to the mere semeity of texts.  Human words are creatures of the moment, even as are the bodies of those who speak the words; fleetingly they are present and then pass away.  David Lyle Jeffrey People of the Book 69.

     Ultimately my fullest appreciation goes to literature that pleases me, not only by its imaginative beauty, but also by its truth.  Leland Ryken Triumphs of the Imagination 150.

     If modern life is ugly and depraved and perverted and violent, we can expect modern literature to be the same in the subject matter it portrays.  Leland Ryken Triumphs of the Imagination 179.

     What is indisputable is that literature is a stimulus to a response.  Leland Ryken Triumphs of the Imagination 187.

     We do not understand literature without a theory of language, and we do not understand either without a theory of life.  Michael Edwards Toward a Christian Poetics 1.

     We do have a sense of language in an Edenic condition of efficacy and plenitude, at one with the world and with ourselves, fulfilling our desires as speakers and writers, and doing so with ease.  We recognize it at times as a quite prodigious power.  On the other hand, we also know, perhaps more clearly in our century than ever before, that language has been subjected, like the human and non-human world to which it belongs, to ‘vanity’ and ‘corruption.’  The Edenic harmonies lost, our access to it – as to everything else – is troubled, and our engagement with it a form of our exilic labour.  Michael Edwards Toward  A Christian Poetics 11.

     My contention is that part of the function of language and literature is too strain towards that spiritualising of the body. Michael Edwards Toward a Christian Poetics, 5.

     Language, if one accepts this teaching, is neither additional to the rest of our experience nor merely of extreme importance.  It is within us and we are within it, rather as if language, like air, were the medium through which we move and which moves through us.  It is our way, to ourselves, to this world, to another, and to God.  And it is disturbed, a divine word challenged by lapsed human words.  Michael Edwards Toward a Christian Poetics 220.

     In the imperfect area of human signification, where we see now “as in a mirror enigmatically,” the asymptotic character of fallen language is a source of endless frustration as well as momentary joy.  David Lyle Jeffrey People of the Book 8.