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John Schad - Queer Fish, Inbunden

Inbunden, Engelska, 2004

Queer Fish

Christian Unreason from Darwin to Derrida

Av John Schad

778 kr

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Beskrivning
At some point in the nineteenth century, God died, the world grew secular, and Christianity became oppositional, irrational, odd, even queer -- or so the story goes. To explore this narrative, John Schad offers a suitably odd or 'unreasonable' history of what Michel Foucault once called 'Christian unreason'. This proves, in part, to be an unlikely, or uncanny history of Christian involvement in such radical movements and developments as Anarchism, Surrealism, the Absurd, deconstruction, and even quantum physics. It also proves to be a dark and guilty history of Christian involvement in such terrible things and events as slavery, forced conversion, Fenian bombs, the Great War, the Holocaust, and even Hiroshima. The book begins with Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach' and its withdrawing 'sea of faith' as time and again Schad finds the figure of the Christian to be beached, a fish out of water -- a queer fish, in fact. This, then, is a book that is all at sea -- beginning with Charles Darwin's voyage to the 'extreme point of Christendom' that was South America, and ending with James Joyce and Jacques Derrida in 'the same boat', the same ruined, but sea-going, boat that is the twentieth-century Western Church. In between: Karl Marx is to be found in 1848 watching 'the waves of revolution' withdraw in Berlin; Sigmund Freud stands incredulous by the shore of Loch Ness; Oscar Wilde is laughed at in the rain at Clapham Junction; and Charles Dickens visits a church for the drowned, a church for ship-wrecked corpses. Revisiting 'Dover Beach' is often an appalling event, an event of death; often it is comic or even absurd. Sometimes it is both at once. With chapters devoted to Darwin, Marx, Freud, Dickens, Wilde, Joyce, and Derrida, Queer Fish has plenty for students not only of literature and philosophy but also theology and Jewish studies.
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John Schad is Professor of Modern Literature at Loughborough University. He is author of Queer Fish: Christian Unreason from Darwin to Derrida, Victorians In Theory and The Reader in the Dickensian Mirrors; editor of Writing the Bodies of Christ, Thomas Hardy’s A Laodicean and Dickens Refigured; and co-editor of life.after.theory. Professor Schad is currently writing an experimental book called Derrida via Oxford: Barely a Life.

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"Schad's book is quirky and highly informative, theoretically sophisticated and written in a unique, distinctive voice. Expanding on Foucault's idea that a 'mad' unreasoning Christian tradition re-emerged at the 'moment' of Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, Queer Fish has a broad scope. The first half of the book encompasses an uncanny Darwin and a prophetic Marx, and ends with Freud's religious 'train of thought'. The second half begins with the 'cryptic church' of Dickens and Wilde's queer Christianity and ends with the religious turn of Derrida read back into a postcolonial and post-Catholic Joyce. The book is essential reading for anyone wanting to make sense of the traces of Christianity in our supposedly secular age." -- Bryan Cheyette, author of Constructions of 'the Jew' in English Literature and Society (Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Muriel Spark (Northcote Press, 2000)."John Schad's account of Christian unreason makes both belief and unbelief the more relevant for us today. Queer Fish is a critical, yet always empathetic, rereading of some of the major thinkers of the last two centuries, whose influence we are still experiencing even today. The author's critical analysis inspires respect and trust, even when we disagree." -- Jonathan Dollimore, author of Political Shakespeare (Cornell University Press, 1994) and Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (Routledge, 1998)."The connections that Schad makes are often truly enlightening. ...The chapter on Wilde is particularly well done and exudes a genuine admiration and sympathetic understanding rarely encountered in academic writing. ...a rather extraordinary book that deserves a wide and appreciative readership." -- Kevin Mills, The Glass No.17, Spring 2005.

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