UVM Theses and Dissertations
Format:
Print
Author:
Seidman, Sarah
Title:
Dept./Program:
English
Year:
2004
Degree:
M.A.
Abstract:
Does doubt have a moral function? Does literature serve a moral function for its readers in engendering such doubt? This thesis's purpose is to answer yes to those questions. Narrative performs a moral act when it puts in question our sense of certainty about we know, and the security of our moral order. Once this sense of authority is undermined, the element of doubt exposes the limitations of any moral system and engenders uncertainty about our own capacity to render moral verdicts. When the foundation of our belief system is shaken, the potential to act with ethical self-awareness comes into being as we choose to affirm, deny or evade the moral system we have taken as our authority. Great literature can subvert ideology in order to expand the creative responsibilities of the human imagination.
My interest is in ethics defined at the intersection of Judeo-Christian thought, post-structuralist theory and narrative. The idea of "story" as the symbol of the transaction between text and reader is itself fraught with possibilities for doubt, as does the instability of language itself. My interest in deconstruction, however, operates less at the linguistic level than at the level of "language" conceived as the site of the public construction of truth.
My introduction argues that the friction between Genesis I and 2 in the Judeo-Christian Bible is the genesis of doubt, and the beginning of story itself. Using theologian and critic John Dominic Crossan's analysis of parable, chapter one traces how Jesus' parables foster doubt at a fundamental level for the purpose of transcendence in Mark's gospel in the New Testament. Refuting elements of critic Stanley Fish's seminal reading of the seventeenth-century poet John Milton's Paradise Lost, chapter two indicates how doubt played a central theological, autobiographical and narrative role in Milton's retelling of the Genesis story. Chapter three explores the parabolic potential of gospel in modem cinema by contrasting Denys Arcand's 1990 Jesus of Montreal and Mel Gibson's 2004 The Passion of the Christ. My conclusion investigates doubt at the level of signification itself, proposing that uncertainty is the site of ethical self-awareness and a complicated space that represents the essence of free will and the ambiguity of concepts of good and evil.
My interest is in ethics defined at the intersection of Judeo-Christian thought, post-structuralist theory and narrative. The idea of "story" as the symbol of the transaction between text and reader is itself fraught with possibilities for doubt, as does the instability of language itself. My interest in deconstruction, however, operates less at the linguistic level than at the level of "language" conceived as the site of the public construction of truth.
My introduction argues that the friction between Genesis I and 2 in the Judeo-Christian Bible is the genesis of doubt, and the beginning of story itself. Using theologian and critic John Dominic Crossan's analysis of parable, chapter one traces how Jesus' parables foster doubt at a fundamental level for the purpose of transcendence in Mark's gospel in the New Testament. Refuting elements of critic Stanley Fish's seminal reading of the seventeenth-century poet John Milton's Paradise Lost, chapter two indicates how doubt played a central theological, autobiographical and narrative role in Milton's retelling of the Genesis story. Chapter three explores the parabolic potential of gospel in modem cinema by contrasting Denys Arcand's 1990 Jesus of Montreal and Mel Gibson's 2004 The Passion of the Christ. My conclusion investigates doubt at the level of signification itself, proposing that uncertainty is the site of ethical self-awareness and a complicated space that represents the essence of free will and the ambiguity of concepts of good and evil.