Robert, have you had a chance yet to read Jeremy Holmes's "Cur Deus Verba: Why the Word of God Became Words"? If not, drop everything (so to speak), and please read it! His reflections on why man, as social animal, is naturally traditional, develops and requires a literary canon, and finds himself through assimilating this canon are, in my opinion, unique, and uniquely profound. I have read a lot in this area and have never found anyone who explores the theme better. It suits Via Mediaevalis hand-in-glove.
I got my hands on it through Interlibrary Loan back in December, started reading it, set it aside for weeks because of holiday busy-ness followed by catastrophic illness followed by start of spring semester, and then had to return it before I had made it even one-fourth of the way through! I was thinking about putting in another Interlibrary Loan request, but with this comment you've breached the wall of my inveterate frugality, and I'm just going to buy a copy, because the book sounds simply superb! (What a delight it will be to mark up the pages knowing that I won't have to erase all the annotations as the due date approaches!)
Glad to hear it. Like many great books, it has a somewhat slow start but then builds as it goes to a massive crescendo that includes the most thorough and perfect defense of "subjective" allegorical readings of Scripture that has yet been penned. He gives the foundation for the medievals' playfulness in (e.g.) the Song of Songs.
I haven't read Forster's discussion, but from the quotes above he seems to focus on writing. The contrast between "flatness" and "roundness" seems to map fairly well onto some of the points Ong raised in "Orality and Literacy". I wonder, then, if you see "flatness" of character as emerging from older oral traditions, whereas "roundedness" would come later, with the emergence & spread of writing.
If "roundedness" and "flatness" were both available to Gregory, say, then we could suggest that Benedict's "flatness" was a rhetorical strategy, a choice - perhaps consciously intended to invite the kind of "work" from the reader that you describe above.
Put another way, if Gregory had had the option of making Benedict "round" - ought he to have?
I would say that roundness is difficult to achieve in oral literature; however, written literature was widespread for a very long time before round characters became common. Thus, it's difficult to identify the spread of writing as a causal factor in the development of roundness. It would be easier to trace this causation back to the post-medieval shift toward a psychology of individual agential selfhood.
It's hard to say if Gregory recognized the possibility of depicting Benedict as a round character in the modern sense of the term. However, even if he didn't recognize an alternative, we might still say that flatness was "chosen" insofar as it was appropriate for the rhetorical situation and consistent with hagiographical tradition. And it was appropriate in part because a character like Gregory's Benedict is not so much flat as 𝘱𝘰𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥. In other words, his roundness is not imposed by the author, and consequently people were able to actualize his roundness in their own minds and in ways that varied according to individual circumstances, leading (ideally) to a more intimate and personalized connection between the reader/hearer and the saint. The assumption here, a reasonable one I think, is that folks back then would have done this more readily and more naturally than many modern readers do, because they were not in the habit of reading books with "pre-rounded" characters.
Yes, writing would seem to be a necessary-but-insufficient condition for what we call roundness.
Following up the ethical implications of your second paragraph (and a point you made in the post) - if rounded characters create a hazard because they do too much of the work for the reader, could the same hazard be identified in, e.g., a well-articulated, logical, sourced essay? That is, ought writers always aim to provide "less" in order to encourage readers to develop, through that more difficult engagement, a more "intimate and personalized connection" with the subject? Or is the sort of work a reader does when engaging with a narrative meaningfully different from the sort of work a reader does when engaging with an argument?
I may be coming off as contrarian - let me say that I'm very sympathetic to the points made here!
Robert, have you had a chance yet to read Jeremy Holmes's "Cur Deus Verba: Why the Word of God Became Words"? If not, drop everything (so to speak), and please read it! His reflections on why man, as social animal, is naturally traditional, develops and requires a literary canon, and finds himself through assimilating this canon are, in my opinion, unique, and uniquely profound. I have read a lot in this area and have never found anyone who explores the theme better. It suits Via Mediaevalis hand-in-glove.
I got my hands on it through Interlibrary Loan back in December, started reading it, set it aside for weeks because of holiday busy-ness followed by catastrophic illness followed by start of spring semester, and then had to return it before I had made it even one-fourth of the way through! I was thinking about putting in another Interlibrary Loan request, but with this comment you've breached the wall of my inveterate frugality, and I'm just going to buy a copy, because the book sounds simply superb! (What a delight it will be to mark up the pages knowing that I won't have to erase all the annotations as the due date approaches!)
Glad to hear it. Like many great books, it has a somewhat slow start but then builds as it goes to a massive crescendo that includes the most thorough and perfect defense of "subjective" allegorical readings of Scripture that has yet been penned. He gives the foundation for the medievals' playfulness in (e.g.) the Song of Songs.
Interesting, as always.
I haven't read Forster's discussion, but from the quotes above he seems to focus on writing. The contrast between "flatness" and "roundness" seems to map fairly well onto some of the points Ong raised in "Orality and Literacy". I wonder, then, if you see "flatness" of character as emerging from older oral traditions, whereas "roundedness" would come later, with the emergence & spread of writing.
If "roundedness" and "flatness" were both available to Gregory, say, then we could suggest that Benedict's "flatness" was a rhetorical strategy, a choice - perhaps consciously intended to invite the kind of "work" from the reader that you describe above.
Put another way, if Gregory had had the option of making Benedict "round" - ought he to have?
I would say that roundness is difficult to achieve in oral literature; however, written literature was widespread for a very long time before round characters became common. Thus, it's difficult to identify the spread of writing as a causal factor in the development of roundness. It would be easier to trace this causation back to the post-medieval shift toward a psychology of individual agential selfhood.
It's hard to say if Gregory recognized the possibility of depicting Benedict as a round character in the modern sense of the term. However, even if he didn't recognize an alternative, we might still say that flatness was "chosen" insofar as it was appropriate for the rhetorical situation and consistent with hagiographical tradition. And it was appropriate in part because a character like Gregory's Benedict is not so much flat as 𝘱𝘰𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥. In other words, his roundness is not imposed by the author, and consequently people were able to actualize his roundness in their own minds and in ways that varied according to individual circumstances, leading (ideally) to a more intimate and personalized connection between the reader/hearer and the saint. The assumption here, a reasonable one I think, is that folks back then would have done this more readily and more naturally than many modern readers do, because they were not in the habit of reading books with "pre-rounded" characters.
Yes, writing would seem to be a necessary-but-insufficient condition for what we call roundness.
Following up the ethical implications of your second paragraph (and a point you made in the post) - if rounded characters create a hazard because they do too much of the work for the reader, could the same hazard be identified in, e.g., a well-articulated, logical, sourced essay? That is, ought writers always aim to provide "less" in order to encourage readers to develop, through that more difficult engagement, a more "intimate and personalized connection" with the subject? Or is the sort of work a reader does when engaging with a narrative meaningfully different from the sort of work a reader does when engaging with an argument?
I may be coming off as contrarian - let me say that I'm very sympathetic to the points made here!
Interesting!!