Lit & Culture: The Catholic Imagination

Catalog description

This course explores the literary output of a group of authors who self-identify as Catholic and who explore timeless and contemporary issues of human experience in ways informed by their Catholicism. As such, we will investigate what Catholicism once meant, what it means still, how it has changed or developed since Vatican II, and how changes within the Church have been reflected in literature. We'll read Catholic authors British and American, pre- and post-conciliar, men and women, devout and lapsed. With such disparate experiences for our authors in terms of history, place, gender, and commitment to the Church, we should expect the texts themselves to be markedly different as well. At the same time, we will always foreground those questions that explore the spiritual inheritance each of these authors shares, towards developing a working definition of the Catholic imagination. Catholic writing, we will see, is not characterized by setting stories in churches or in teaching tidy moral lessons, but rather by "the nature of the eye through which the action is seen."