This article considers the powerful role of language and imaginative literature in cultural and self-formation. Drawing on Richard Rorty’s description of narrative forms as vehicles for meaning, I describe leading metaphors in representative literature of the Modern period. I suggest that Modernism exhibits a cultural loss of meaning, and a “death of God” zeitgeist. Works of that period also show pessimism about erotic relationships. I proceed with a close reading of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, which was written just as the Modern period closes. In Updike, the protagonist intuits a strong spirituality and finds rich erotic experience. But in the wake of Modernism’s spiritual vacuity, and erotic pessimism, the protagonist in Rabbit, Run desperately seeks a vocabulary to voice his intuitions which his own culture cannot sustain.
Selfless Love and Human Flourishing in Paul Tillich and Iris Murdoch, by Julia T. Meszaros. Oxford University Press, 2016. 227 pp. Kindle, $114.69. ISBN 978-0-19-876586-8.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.