Force Of Tradition

Introduction: The Force Of Tradition
Donald G. Marshall
Tradition And The Terror Of History: Christianity, The Holocaust, And The Jewish Theological Dilemma
Gerald L. Bruns
Charity Militant: Gadamer, Davidson, And Post-Critical Hermeneutics
Joel Weinsheimer
“In The Chorus Of Others”: M. M. Bakhtin’s Sense Of Tradition
Susan Felch
The Role Of The Kuhnian Paradigm In Tradition And Originality
Genevieve Later
Walking Vs. Flying: Kierkegaard On Tradition And The Moral Import Of Literature
Norman Lillegard
My Own Private New England: Tradition, The Self, And The State In Cotton Mather’s Wonders Of The Invisible World
Michael Schnell
Holy Fire: Biblical Radicalism In The Narratives Of Jarena Lee And Zilpha Elaw
Margaret Cullen
ESTESE And Doblado: Coleridge, Blanco White, And The Church Of Rome
Daniel McVeigh
Jane Eyre And The Tradition Of Self-Assertion; Or Bronte’s Socialization Of Schiller’s “Play Aesthetic”
Michael Vander Weele
Tradition And Liberation: A Critique Of German Cultural Modernity In Heinrich Boll And Hans-Georg Gadamer
William Slaymaker
Community, Text, And Tradition In The French Lieutenant’s Woman
David Landrum
Storytellers And Interpreters In Achebe
Alan Jacobs
Contributors

Additional Info
How do we stand in relation to everything that comes down to us from the past? Is the very idea of tradition still useful in the wake of historical ruptures, such as the Holocaust, changes in the canon, and the end of colonialism? The concept of tradition has gained renewed importance in recent cultural studies. Suspicion of tradition as culturally narrow and oppressive is a persistent theme of modernity and has increased lately with the resurgence of religious traditionalism around the globe. At the same time, various groups demanding recognition for their distinctive cultural identity have reclaimed their traditions.

Philosophers from Josiah Royce and Hans-Georg Gadamer to Alasdair MacIntyre have explored the relations between tradition and themes such as freedom, community, self-assertion, originality, and the shared values and interpretations that constitute everyday life. The essays in this volume offer varying, even disparate analyses of religious, literary, and cultural traditions and both responses and resistance to them in a variety of philosophers, novelists, and theologians. They examine works by Gadamer, Royce, MacIntyre, Plato, Jacques Derrida, Charlotte Bronte, Sren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Edith Wharton, Chinua Achebe, John Fowles, Heinrich Boll, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Cotton Mather, Thomas Kuhn, Mikhail Bakhtin, Donald Davidson, Antebellum African-American women preachers, and Christian and Jewish thinkers in the wake of the Holocaust.