Department of Language, Culture & Gender Studies
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Browsing Department of Language, Culture & Gender Studies by Author "Fehler, Brian"
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Item Flannery O’Connor, Richard M. Weaver, and midcentury conservative critiques of social science discourse(Center for the Study of Christian Values in Literature: Brigham Young University, 2020) Fehler, BrianIn her fiction and correspondence, Flannery O'Connor demonstrates particular disdain for secular social scientists, including such supposedly well-meaning people as Rayber in The Violent Bear It Away and Sheppard in "The Lame Shall Enter First." O'Connor, who majored in social sciences while in college, wrote to her longtime correspondent Betty Hester years later, "In college I read works of socialscience, so-called. The only thing that kept me from being a social-scientist was the grace of God and the fact that I couldn't remember reading the stuff but a few days after reading it" ( Collected Works 905). It may be unclear whether the "so-called" in O'Connor's letter refers to the social sciences in general or to the works she had been assigned. In either case, O'Connor certainly seems to have held the work of social scientists in contempt. But why should that be the case? The Catholic Church certainly has a long history of advocating for the improvement of conditions in this world, while still preparing for the next. O'Connor, who trains her "rage of vision" on the Church as well as on secular society, reports, for example, the mixed results of a Jesuit's social advocacy in "The Displaced Person," but undoubtedly she reserves her sharpest criticism for those socially conscious individuals outside the Church.Item Flannery O’Connor’s Hazel Motes as Sacred Rhetorician(Center for the Study of Christian Values in Literature: Brigham Young University, 2016) Fehler, BrianHazel Motes, a peculiar character even among Flannery O'Connor's cast of eccentric characters, stands out among the rest because of his extreme introspection. Many O'Connor characters are alike in their desire to flaunt their odd but cherished attitudes and behaviors. But Hazel represents something else. He is a young man recently returned from war, yet his psychological peculiarities seem to have preceded that war. While Hazel, one may imagine, did not appear as an average soldier, he seems nevertheless not to have acquired any more scars in the war than he did anywhere else in his life. No, the "haunting" of Hazel Motes comes from something else (Seel 68), from, as O'Connor writes in the preface to the tenth-anniversary edition of Wise Blood (1949), "the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind" ("Author's" 1265). Strangely enough, this "ragged figure" seems to push Hazel toward the city, toward spectacle-filled, circus-like Taulkinham, a city where there seems to be a place for anyone and anything- anyone except Hazel, that is.Item Recovering the rhetorical tradition: George Campbell’s Sympathy and its Augustinian roots(BYU ScholarsArchive, 2015) Fehler, BrianThe year 1776 saw the production of two important documents of the Enlightenment: the US Constitution and George Campbell's The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Both documents were products of Enlightenment thought, and both demonstrate the conflicting attitudes in the era toward the rhetorical use of emotional appeals. Recent scholarship by John Witte examines the religious roots of the anti-emotionalist rhetoric expressed by Federalist politicians in the Constitutional era and in particular the influence of the Calvinist clergy of New England, with their "Puritan covenantal theory of ordered liberty and orderly pluralism:' Like the Federalists who were in charge of the new US government, the Calvinists of New England not only celebrated the victory achieved in the Revolution but also worked to ensure that the new American republic did not descend into the kind of chaos that later consumed revolutionary France.Item ‘Sex variants’ were everywhere(The Gay & Lesbian Review/Worldwide, 2020) Fehler, BrianThe Supreme Court's recent decision in Bostock v. Clayton County outlawed employment discrimination based on sexual orientation for all Americans. Yet amid the justifiable jubilation surrounding that decision, an important scientific history lesson for our community has gone overlooked. In an amicus brief filed with the Court in the case, a group of gay and lesbian historians cited a scientific work that's been mostly forgotten in the eight decades since it was published. Even more thoroughly forgotten, and unmentioned in the historians' brief, were the contributions to that study by a lesbian named Jan Gay whose work and passion made the whole project possible.Item Traditions of western rhetoric and Daesoon Jinrihoe: Prolegomena to further investigations(Daesoon Academy of Sciences (DAOS), 2022) Fehler, BrianApplying the long and distinguished heritage of rhetorical theory to any sacred text, such The Canonical Scripture of Daesoon Jinrihoe, could fill many volumes of many books. This study, then, will provide some suggestive prolegomena for directions rhetorical criticism of the Scripture can take, now and in future research. This study will, further, make necessarily broad strokes in order to familiarize audiences and scholars of new Korean religions, and Eastern thought generally, with Western, both ancient and more modern, modes of rhetorical thought. As rhetorical criticism is increasingly embraced by Western religious scholarship, and as comparative religious studies remain an important dimension of textual scholarship, this article will contribute to both areas by presenting perhaps the first rhetorical-critical approach to the sacred scriptures of Daesoon Jinrihoe. When the new English translation of the Scriptures becomes available in the West, general and scholarly readers will be interested to find parallels and departures with religious and critical traditions with which they are already familiar (in this case, early American Protestant Calvinism). This study will make contributions, then, to the areas of rhetorical-religious criticism, comparative East-West presentations of nature within scriptural contexts, and establishment of grounds for further comparative investigations of Western traditions and Daesoon Jinrihoe.