© 1977 by American Academy of Religion
Abstracts of Articles |
Religious Ethics and the Social Aspects of Imaginative Literature: William Styron and the Nat Turner Controversy
James G. Moseley (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies in the Division of Humanities and Coordinator of American Studies at New College of the University of South Florida. He is the author of A Complex Inhertiance: The Idea of Self-Transcendence in the Theology of Henry James, Senior, and the Novels of Henry James (AAR Dissertation Series, 4) and "Conversion through Vision Puritanism and Trancendentalism in The Ambassadors" (JAAR, 43, 3 473-84). A shorter version of this essay was read at the Annual Meeting of the AAR in October, 1975.
The historic variety of relations between art and morality show literature existing in a number of contexts. With respect at least to the social aspects of a work of imaginative literature, the task of interpretation leads directly into considerations of religious ethics. Specifically, the strident controversy arising from the publication of William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner indicates a need for what might be called an aesthetics of pluralism. This essay argues generally that there is a moral obligation for such an aesthetics and that its development may proceed most adequately from an analysis of the religious dimensions of contemporary American society.
First, an analysis of the controversy shows (1) that it occurred in an ineluctably pluralistic society, a cultural situation involving varying perceptions of the perimeters between public and private spheres of life, and (2) that neither a purely artistic nor a solely moral view will suffice to illumine that situation.
Second, it is shown that we are in need of an aesthetic of cultural interaction, an aesthetic which maximizes our pluralistic humanity.
Third, this analysis presents a theological challenge for reconceptualization in religious thought, a religiously grounded moral obligation to respect even those social and cultural differences we do not fully comprehend, and an aesthetic requirement for readers and writers to be attuned to the way their own value-orientations may mesh or clash with those of the persons they join in the experience of literature.
At least two consequences follow for art and morality: first, since insight in a pluralistic situation depends on our perception of others being heightened to the level of aesthetic appreciation, it has the motive power to reorient our affections, to initiate new convictions about human relations, and hence to serve as a springboard for moral concern and action; and, second, such insight enables the making of important judgments of cultural phenomena without implicitly considering those who disagree as less than fully human.