Textual Narratives And A New Metaphysics

This title was first published in 2002: Drawing extensively upon recent developments in post-phenomenological philosophy, especially 'the textual turn' exemplified by Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this book explores the role that textual narratives have in the possibility of reasonably affirming the intelligibility of the world. Shorthouse reveals how textual narratives can play a primary role in affirming rational meaning in a continuing hermeneutical process. Offering a radically new approach to metaphysics, Shorthouse demonstrates that rational meaning is ontologically grounded in terms of a transcendental viewpoint or perspective. It is this grounding which transcends the language and the self in a hermeneutical movement towards the affirmation of rational meaning. Revealing that the critical characteristic of reading a narrative is rhythm, Shorthouse explains how each narrative has a rhythmic structure, or prose rhythm, in relation to its semantic and figurative characteristics, activity and mood. Two key questions are explored: what kind of rational unity may be affirmed which does not close or suspend reflection? and what kind of linguistic mediation may generate an extralinguistic, or transcendental element in establishing an ontological grounding for this affirmation? The response to both these questions is presented in terms of textual sonority, where Shorthouse draws upon, and develops, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's notion of sonorous being.

"I was and I am an ordinary theologian, who does not have the Word of God at his disposal, but, at best, a 'Doctrine of the Word of God,'" writes Karl Barth in the preface of Die christliche Dogmatik im Emtwurf. Properly appreciating the complex career of Barth's characterization of what Scripture is theologically can open up constructive lines of inquiry regarding his self-description as a theologian and reader of the Bible. By mining Barth's published and posthumous theological and exegetical writings and sermons, both well-known materials and understudied writings such as the significant "Das Schriftprinzip der reformierten Kirche" lecture, Alfred H. Yuen offers a unique reading of Barth's thoughts on the person and work of the biblical writers by mapping his theological career as a university student, a pastor, a writer, a young professor, and, above all, a "child of God" (CD I/1, 464-65).

This book develops a stimulating new way of looking at texts, with case studies from Western and Indian literature.

Performing a critical analysis of new scientific research on religious and spiritual phenomena, Grassie takes a two-staged phenomenological approach working from the 'outside in' and the 'bottom up' without privileging at the outset any religious traditions or philosophical assumptions.

By synthesizing Kayser's and Bakhtin's views of the grotesque and Heidegger's philosophy of Being, American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque seeks to demonstrate that American fiction from Poe to Pynchon has tried to convey the existential dimension: the pre-individual totality or flow of life, which defines itself against the mind and its linguistic capacity. Dieter Meindl shows how the grotesque, through its self-contradictory nature, has been instrumental in expressing this reality-conception, an antirationalist stance in basic agreement with existential thought. The historical validity of this new metaphysics, which grants precedence to Being--the context of cognition--over the cognizant subject, must be upheld in the face of deconstructive animadversions upon any metaphysics of presence. The notion of decentering the subject, Meindl argues, did not originate with deconstruction. The existential grotesque confirms the protomodernist character of classic American fiction. Meindl traces its course through a number of well-known texts by Melville, James, Gilman, Anderson, Faulkner, and O'Connor, among others. To convey life conceived as motion, these writers had to capture--that is, immobilize--it in their art: an essentially distortive and, therefore, grotesque device. Melville's "Bartleby," dealing with a mort vivant, is the seminal text in this mode of indirectness. As opposed to the existential grotesque, which grants access to a preverbal realm, the linguistic grotesque of postmodern fiction works on the assumption that all reality is referable to language in a textual universe. American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque will significantly alter our understanding of certain traditions in American literature.

In From Metaphysics to Midrash, Shaul Magid explores the exegetical tradition of Isaac Luria and his followers within the historical context in 16th-century Safed, a unique community that brought practitioners of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam into close contact with one another. Luria's scripture became a theater in which kabbalists redrew boundaries of difference in areas of ethnicity, gender, and the human relation to the divine. Magid investigates how cultural influences altered scriptural exegesis of Lurianic Kabbala in its philosophical, hermeneutical, and historical perspectives. He suggests that Luria and his followers were far from cloistered. They used their considerable skills to weigh in on important matters of the day, offering, at times, some surprising solutions to perennial theological problems.