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205 pages

English

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How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic is a sweeping survey of some of the finest literary works ever written by our fallen and yet redeemed race. Joshua Hren takes readers on a tour that spans centuries and explores our broken path to salvation, passing through stories known to many but perhaps understood by few, and others that merit a broader readership.With appeals to staples of the Catholic literary tradition such as Flannery O'Connor and Evelyn Waugh, to the often-sidelined works of Leon Bloy, Caroline Gordon, and Christopher Beha, to the masterpieces of even those who were distanced from the Church-Flaubert and James Joyce and Chekhov; Hemingway and David Foster Wallace and George Saunders-Hren sheds light on stories that grapple with matters essential to Catholics.His intrinsically Catholic approach to the study of literature examines the presence of conversion in great literary texts, and considers the way in which writers dramatize the workings of grace upon nature. His analysis also bears a sacramental vision, articulating the ways in which seen images point to unseen realities. How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic searches out the persistence of Catholic ideas, images, and concerns in purportedly secular and postmodern stories. It is a love letter to the Christic imagination which incarnates human nature as having its final end not in the characters' self-actualization, but in their salvation, giving readers of this work a deeper understanding of how the power of story can lead them closer to Christ.Includes a section for aspiring writers devoted to the techniques and devices that make good fiction, as well as a list of must-read literary works by which all Catholics can be enriched.

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Catholic Church

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Publié par	TAN Books
Date de parution	04 mai 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781505118681
Langue	English

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HOW TO READ ( and write ) LIKE A CATHOLIC
HOW TO READ ( and write ) LIKE A CATHOLIC
JOSHUA HREN
TAN Books Gastonia, North Carolina
How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic © 2021 Joshua Hren
All rights reserved. With the exception of short excerpts used in critical review, no part of this work may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in any form whatsoever, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible—Second Catholic Edition (Ignatius Edition), copyright © 2006 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture texts marked as NABRE are taken from the New American Bible, revised edition © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, D.C. and are used by permission of the copyright owner. All Rights Reserved. No part of the New American Bible may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
Cover design by Chris Pelicano
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021931507
ISBN: 978-1-5051-1866-7
Kindle ISBN: 978-1-5051-1867-4
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-5051-1868-1
Published in the United States by
TAN Books
PO Box 269
Gastonia, NC 28053
www.TANBooks.com
Printed in the United States of America
For Dana Gioia, who has given this verse a real presence:
“Be not therefore solicitous for tomorrow; for the morrow will be solicitous for itself. Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.”
—Matthew 6:34, DRA
“Joshua Hren’s How to Read (and Write) Like A Catholic pays tribute to a wide range of notable authors from the Catholic literary tradition. But what follows Hren’s exquisite and original exploration of literary texts is a quiet challenge: a Catholic writer whose work finds deep relevance in our age will be one who shrugs off easy platitudes and instead pursues an unflinching moral, intellectual, and artistic engagement.”
—Christine Flanagan, author / editor The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon
“Joshua Hren shows us how to read well by delving deeply into the well of living meaning to be found in great literature. Learning to read (and write) like a Catholic is to leave the shallows to swim in the depths and to step out of the shadows into the light. It is life changing.”
—Joseph Pearce, author of Catholic Literary Giants: A Field Guide to the Catholic Literary Landscape , and many more
Joshua Hren’s How to Read (and Write) like a Catholic is not just another thick, square book. It is a catechism that will guide you through the long Catholic literary tradition, stopping along the way to introduce you to its best authors and to examine the great questions of judgment and craft that every reader and every writer must consider. This is not just a new book by an important young author; it is the fruit of an entire tradition. It is no mere survey; it is an introduction to a way of living well within the human drama of Christianity.
—James Matthew Wilson, Poet-in-Residence, Benedict XVI Institute for Sacred Music and Divine Liturgy
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I Reading (and Writing) Like a Catholic
Chapter 1 Between a Record of Man in Rebellion and the Beatific Vision: Conversion in Catholic Literature
Chapter 2 Beauty Will Not Save the World but the Literature You Save May Be Your Own
Chapter 3 The Ends of the Novel
Chapter 4 Whispers and Shouts of Faith in Fiction: Léon Bloy and the Catholic Writer Today
Part II Reading Christ-Haunted Fictions
Chapter 5 A Dank, Dimly-Lighted Place: Hemingway on Affliction, Beauty, and Being at Home in the World
Chapter 6 Christ-Haunted George Saunders
Chapter 7 Jack Kerouac’s Beatific Visions
Chapter 8 Peace in a Plastic World: Evelyn Waugh’s Nativity
Chapter 9 Thank You for the Light, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Chapter 10 The Pallor of Our Plagues: Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider
Chapter 11 Marriage Prospects with David Foster Wallace
Chapter 12 Portrait of a Paralyzed Priesthood: James Joyce’s “The Sisters”
Chapter 13 For Whom Chekhov’s Bell Tolls
Chapter 14 Flaubert’s Fictional Faith
Part III Reading Human Nature
Chapter 15 Acolyte of Ambition: Balzac’s Lost Illusions and Lost Souls
Chapter 16 Reading the Riddle of Human Nature, from Homer to Dostoevsky
Part IV Reading Catholic Fictions
Chapter 17 The Problem of Pity: Misguided Mercy & Dante’s Infernal Purgation
Chapter 18 What Waugh Saw in America: An Anglo-American Romance
Chapter 19 The Sound and the Fury, Symbolizing Something: Walker Percy and Jacques Maritain on the Paradoxical Miracle at the Limits of Language
Chapter 20 Stay in Your Lane or You’ll Get into ‘The Trouble’”: J. F. Powers and the First Commandment of Fiction
Chapter 21 Caroline Gordon Lost and Found: The Malefactors
Chapter 22 Mistakes Were Made: The Apocalypse of Truth in A Canticle for Leibowitz
Chapter 23 Christopher Beha’s Capacity for God: What Happened to Sophie Wilder Revisited
Chapter 24 What the Catholic Novel Might Become: Randy Boyagoda’s Original Prin
Part V How to Write (Like a Catholic)
Chapter 25 Introduction
Chapter 26 The Trouble with Technique and the Artistic Habit
Chapter 27 Most Grievous Faults and Fictional Reparations
Chapter 28 The Problem of Proper Proportion
Chapter 29 Dialogue, Dead or Alive
Chapter 30 The Heresy of Formlessness and Old Faithful Unity
Chapter 31 A Handful of Dust (Drop the Rest on the Floor), and a Half-Sketched Story with an Essay Woven Through it
Chapter 32 The Duties of Details
Chapter 33 Don’t Make a Scene: Consciousness and Three Sensuous Strokes
Chapter 34 Central Intelligence and Peripheral Points of View
Chapter 35 Complication and Resolution: Tragic, Eucatastrophic, Comic
Chapter 36 Only a Mystic Can Be a Complete Novelist
Appendix A 101 Books to Read Like a Catholic
Appendix B Reading and Writing Like a Catholic: Further Forays
Acknowledgments
“B ETWEEN A R ECORD of Man in Rebellion and the Beatific Vision: Conversion in Catholic Literature”: a much different, less complete version of this essay originally appeared as a chapter in Renewal of Catholic Higher Education: Essays on Catholic Studies in Honor of Don J. Briel , 2017. A portion of the chapter appeared as “The Artifice of Race and the Art of Grace” in Dappled Things: A Quarterly of Ideas, Art, and Faith . I have also delivered the essay in lecture form on numerous occasions, and am most grateful for good and clarifying counterpoints as well as encouragements from many—all of which made it better than it would have been worked out alone.
“Beauty Will Not Save the World But the Literature You Save May Be Your Own” originally appeared in America Magazine , 2018.
“The Ends of the Novel” originally appeared in Dappled Things , 2020.
“Whispers and Shouts of Faith in Fiction: Léon Bloy and the Catholic Writer Today,” Second Place in Dappled Things’ 2018 Jacques Maritain Prize for Nonfiction.
“A Dank, Dimly-Lighted Place: Affliction, Beauty, and Being at Home in the World” originally appeared in Dappled Things , 2018.
“Christ-Haunted George Saunders” originally appeared in First Things , 2019.
“Saunders on Story” originally appeared in First Things , 2021.
“Jack Kerouac’s Beatific Visions” originally appeared in First Things , 2020.
“Peace in a Plastic World: Evelyn Waugh’s Nativity” originally appeared in First Things , 2019.
“Thank You For the Light, F. Scott Fitzgerald” originally appeared in First Things , 2019.
“The Pallor of Our Plagues: Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider ” originally appeared in Crisis , 2020.
“Marriage Prospects with David Foster Wallace” originally appeared in Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal , 2021.
“For Whom Chekhov’s Bell Tolls,” in Catholic World Report , 2020.
“Portrait of a Paralyzed Priesthood: James Joyce’s ‘The Sisters,’” in Dappled Things , 2020.
“Acolyte of Ambition: Balzac’s Lost Illusions and Lost Souls ,” originally appeared in Law and Liberty , 2021.
“Stay in Your Lane or You’ll Get into ‘The Trouble’” originally appeared in First Things , 2020.
“The Problem of Pity: Misguided Mercy & Dante’s Infernal Purgation,” originally appeared in Touchstone , 2019.
“The Sound and the Fury, Symbolizing Something: Walker Percy and Jacques Maritain on the Paradoxical Miracle at the Limits of Language” originally appeared as a chapter in Redeeming Philosophy: From Metaphysics to Aesthetics , 2014.
“What Waugh Saw in America: An Anglo-American Romance” originally appeared in America magazine in 2020.
“Humanitarianism, Ressentiment , and ‘Love of Mankind’: From Homer to Dostoevsky” originally appeared in LOGOS: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture , 2014.
“Caroline Gordon Lost and Found: The Malefactors ” originally appeared in America , 2021.
“Mistakes Were Made: The Apocalypse of Truth in A Canticle for Leibowitz ” originally appeared in Catholic World Report , 2021.
“Christopher Beha’s Capacity for God: What Happened to Sophie Wilder Revisited,” originally appeared in The University Bookman , 2020.
“What the Catholic Novel Might Become: Randy Boyagoda’s Original Prin ” originally appeared in The University Bookman , 2019.
“Flaubert’s Fictional Faith” originally appeared in The Imaginative Conservative, 2020
“Beauty comes from the fair and the fit, Augustine says.”
“I don’t follow.”
“In other words, it’s a kind of byproduct of the elegance with which an object meets its purpose. A work whose purpose is to be beautiful gets trapped in circularity. It can’t ever succeed in that goal. Beauty can only be arrived at while meeting some real need. So what’s the point? What’s the thing writing is supposed to do, the aim it’s after that along the way produces its beauty?”
—from What Happened to Sophie Wilder by Christopher Beha
Introduction
I T SEEMS THAT the imagination, when it obtains the depths of Catholicity, seek