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Books by Nathan A. Scott, Jr.
The New Orpheus: Essays Toward a Christian Poetic
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The Legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr /
Ernest-Hemingway: A Critical Essay
The
Broken Center: Studies in the Theological Horizon of Modern
Literature /
Nathaniel West: A Critical Essay
The Modern Vision of Death
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The Poetry of Civic Virtue: Eliot, Malraux, Auden /
Adversity and Grace-Studies in Recent American
Literature
Craters of the Spirit: Studies in the Modern
Novel /
Modern Literature and the Religious Frontier
Morphologies of Faith : Essays in Religion and Culture in Honor
of Nathan A. Scott, Jr.
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Judgment
Marked by a Cellar
The American Negro Writer and the Dialectic of
Despair
Nathan A. Scott, Jr. (1925 - 2006)
Nathan A. Scott, Jr.(1925-) was Professor
of Theology and Literature in the Divinity School of the
University of Chicago. He also taught at the University of
Virginia. He has been a major critic of modern
literature who have written extensively on the relationship
between the literary and religious imagination. In the United
States in the field of religion and literature, Scott was one of
the first scholars systematically to draw together the study of
theology and literature, consistently maintaining a close
connection with questions of morality and civic virtue.
Born in Cleveland, Scott attended the University of Michigan
and the union theological Seminary in new York. He received hi
Ph.D. from Columbia University at the age of 24. he later became
chairman of the theology and Literature Field of the Divinity
School at the University of Chicago University.
Ordained as an Episcopal priest, Scott writes with the
intensity and formalism of the Christian creed. Scott's essays
are noted for their diversity and quality. His works have
appeared frequently in journals such as Review of Metaphysics
and Christian Century, as well as Saturday Review and
The Kenyon Review. His essays have been published in many
books edited by other writers: H.J. Mooney, Jr. and T.F. Staley
(editors) The Shapeless God: Essays on
Modern Fiction (1968), and others.
His first book,
Rehearsals of Discomposure: Alienation and
Reconciliation in Modern Literature, was published in 1952.
Other books written and edited by Scott include
Modern Literature and the Religious Frontier(1958), Albert
Camus,
The New Orpheus: Essays Toward a Christian Poetic,
Samuel Beckett (1965),
Craters of the Spirit: Studies in the Modern Novel,
The Broken Center: Studies in the Theological Horizon of Modern
Literature (1966),
Ernest-Hemingway: A Critical Essay
(1966),
Craters of the Spirit: Studies in the Modern Novel
(1968),
Adversity and Grace-Studies in Recent American Literature (1968),
Unquiet Vision: Mirrors of Man in Existentialism (1978),
The Wild Prayer of Longing (1971)
The Poetry of Civic Virtue: Eliot, Malraux, Auden (1976),
Nathaniel West: A Critical Essay (1971),
The Modern Vision of Death (1967),
The Legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr
(1975).
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The boundary
walker: Nathan A. Scott, Jr.—Frederick
Quinn—Scott emerged as a leading Christian literary
voice at a time when modern cultural criticism was
turning toward Marxism, deconstructionism, new
historicism, postcolonial, reader-response and a
variety of other specialized schools of criticism.
Drawing on the work of Paul Tillich, Scott staked
bold claims – that religion gave culture its
substance and that the great themes of alienation
and the quest for unity central to writers as varied
as Kafka, Camus, and Beckett were at heart religious
issues. In a memorial sermon titled “The Boundary
Walker” Samuel T. Lloyd III, a former graduate
student of Scott’s at the University of Virginia,
and now dean of Washington National Cathedral,
recalled, “Nathan sought to articulate the Christian
faith, within the language and thought forms of our
time so that we can understand it in fresh ways. He
believed that the faith conversation had to flow
both ways. Secular thinkers had much to gain from
recognizing the spiritual dimension at work in even
the most non-religious works, and the church too had
a great deal to gain from having its convictions
tested and stretched in conversation with the
spiritual quest of its time.” Lloyd, who Scott hoped
would follow him in an academic-clerical career,
described his mentor as a compelling preacher and
lecturer. “He lived and wrote on the boundary
between religion and literature, between the sacred
and the secular, between the ancient and the modern,
between theology and culture. But there were other
boundaries he walked as well…As a black man from the
North living out his climactic years in the heart of
the Confederacy, he wrote eloquently about this
crucial boundary divide in our culture.”
Despite making
a substantial mark in his time, Scott is
infrequently referred to now. Cultural criticism
moved like a tornado in other directions during his
professional lifetime. Scott called some of its
trends “hermeneutical terrorism,” in a decade before
such terminology had entered common usage. He was
not a polemicist; his genius was in probing the
depths of about forty key world authors over half a
century, and relating them and their texts to
biblical and contemporary issues. His collected
sermons remain to be gathered and Scott awaits a
biographer. His comments about himself were often
guarded. But in a 1993 interview he reflected on the
key influence of his father, who had been taught to
read and write by the local postmaster in Laneville,
Alabama, and who, after struggling to obtain an
education, eventually became a lawyer in Detroit.
“He had been taught Greek and Latin classics. By the
time I was twelve years of age, he had taken me
through the Latin text of Caesar’s Commentary on the
Gallic Wars. I was the despair of my Latin teachers
in junior and senior high school; they had noting to
offer me. His daily devotional reading of the New
Testament involved the koiné Greek text. He had an
enormous passion for the Book. And when I was a
small boy, he had already set me to reading the
Fireside Poets (Greenleaf Whittier, Wadsworth
Longfellow, and so on), as well as Browning and
Tennyson. He had required me to commit to memory
large blocks of this poetry by the time I was ten or
eleven years of age. He contributed more to my
formation than anybody else has ever done!”— EpiscopalCafe
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Life on Mars
By Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith, author of Life on Mars has been selected as the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In its review of the book, Publishers Weekly noted the collection's "lyric brilliance" and "political impulses [that] never falter." A New York Times review stated, "Smith is quick to suggest that the important thing is not to discover whether or not we're alone in the universe; it's to accept—or at least endure—the universe's mystery. . . . Religion, science, art: we turn to them for answers, but the questions persist, especially in times of grief. Smith's pairing of the philosophically minded poems in the book’s first section with the long elegy for her father in the second is brilliant." Life on Mars follows Smith's 2007 collection, Duende, which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the only award for poetry in the United States given to support a poet's second book, and the first Essence Literary Award for poetry, which recognizes the literary achievements of African Americans. The Body’s Question (2003) was her first published collection. Smith said Life on Mars, published by small Minnesota press Graywolf, was inspired in part by her father, who was an engineer on the Hubble space telescope and died in 2008.
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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The Warmth of Other Suns
The Epic Story of America's Great
Migration
By Isabel Wilkerson
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a
sharecropper's wife, left Mississippi
for Milwaukee in 1937, after her cousin
was falsely accused of stealing a white
man's turkeys and was almost beaten to
death. In 1945, George Swanson Starling,
a citrus picker, fled Florida for Harlem
after learning of the grove owners'
plans to give him a "necktie party" (a
lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing Foster
made his trek from Louisiana to
California in 1953, embittered by "the
absurdity that he was doing surgery for
the United States Army and couldn't
operate in his own home town." Anchored
to these three stories is Pulitzer
Prize–winning journalist Wilkerson's
magnificent, extensively researched
study of the "great migration," the
exodus of six million black Southerners
out of the terror of Jim Crow to an
"uncertain existence" in the North and
Midwest. Wilkerson deftly incorporates
sociological and historical studies into
the novelistic narratives of Gladney,
Starling, and Pershing settling in new
lands, building anew, and often finding
that they have not left racism behind.
The drama, poignancy, and romance of a
classic immigrant saga pervade this
book, hold the reader in its grasp, and
resonate long after the reading is done.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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