2007
AML Award:
Criticism
Presented to:
Terryl L. Givens
For:
People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture
The Association for Mormon Letters is pleased to present its 2007 award in Criticism
to Terryl Givens for
People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture, published
by Oxford University Press. Terryl Givens’ distinctive contribution to Mormon Letters
is driven by a developing and highly effective integration of contemporary literary
theory with more traditional modes of literary history. His interpretive insight
allows him to interrogate the culture and probe its strengths and weaknesses with
both skill and power. His eloquent style illuminates and clarifies the important
questions he raises and answers. In
People of Paradox, he employs methods subtly
derived from culture studies to illustrate and illuminate how paradox generates vital
cultural energy in Mormon society. His identification of four generative paradoxes,
conflicts between “authority and radical freedom,” “searching and certainty,” “the
sacred and the banal,” “election and exile,” provides a rich critical framework within
which to understand the expansiveness of Mormon culture and to evaluate its highest
achievements. At the same time, he relies on the tradition of the humanities to place
the Mormon life of the mind in the easily accessible categories of the visual arts,
architecture, music and dance, drama, poetry, fiction, and film. Each chapter is a
thorough and compact exploration of how paradox informs and enlivens each Mormon art.
People of Paradox thereby announces the coming of age of Mormon culture. No single
work has previously sought to explore Mormon culture on this scale. No previous critic
has found the culture worthy of such focused and extensive study. The results are
felicitous indeed, as we now have a single volume filled with rich insights guaranteed
to stimulate further critical investigation. With
The Viper on the Hearth and
By the
Hand of Mormon,
People of Paradox will take its proper place alongside the works of
Hugh Nibley, Eugene England, Richard Cracroft, and Truman Madsen at the very core of
demonstrating how our faith generates and respects the life of the mind, has profound
intellectual substance, rewards critical inquiry, rises above the parochial, and invites
the honest seeker after truth to search out the eternal in Mormon experience.