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“Rituals of the Ordinary”: Marilynne Robinson's Aesthetics of Belief and Finitude

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Ray Horton
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Abstract

Marilynne Robinson, the author of Housekeeping, Gilead, Home, and Lila, has garnered attention for her sustained engagement with religious themes. Yet for all its robust participation in the theology of a distinctively Calvinist Protestantism, Robinson's fiction is invested in religious forms that are less propositional than phenomenological. It imagines belief as both a perceptual background and a system of thought that activates concentrated aesthetic attention to quotidian moments of temporal contingency and worldly ephemerality. Consequently, Robinson's work intervenes in the burgeoning critical discourse surrounding religion and literature, offering an alternative to methodologies that prioritize the ontology of belief over the aesthetic modes of perception that belief makes available.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 132 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 119 - 134
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2017

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