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Narrative, Religion and Science

Narrative, Religion and Science

Narrative, Religion and Science

Fundamentalism versus Irony, 1700–1999
Stephen Prickett, Duke University, North Carolina
June 2002
Paperback
9780521009836

    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.

    • Exposes and explores the 'narrative' in ways of thinking about the world over 300 years
    • Unites philosophy, theology and science
    • Broad historical overview

    Reviews & endorsements

    '… a discussion which is brisk, jargon-free and splendidly readable.' The Times Literary Supplement

    'Written with wit and verve … It is the best kind of popular cultural thinking, helping the educated lay person to hold together a range of 'stories' from the last three hundred years of the cultural history of the West … this is an attractive and stimulating book' Theology

    See more reviews

    Product details

    June 2002
    Paperback
    9780521009836
    290 pages
    229 × 152 × 19 mm
    0.465kg
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • 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.
      Author
    • Stephen Prickett , Duke University, North Carolina

      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 PhD in 1968. Previous appointments include the Chair of English at the Australian National University in Canberra (1983–9), and teaching posts at the Universities of Sussex (1967–82), Minnesota (1979–80), and Smith College, Massachusetts(1970–1). 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 Commentaries.