Presented to: Dian Saderup Monson
For: "Believing in the Word"
In "Believing in the Word" Dian Saderup Monson brings a Mormon sensibility to a larger national audience, challenging the skepticism of contemporary literary theory and boldly claiming that language and literature, reading and writing are inherently acts of faith.
The indeterminacy of language does not make true communication impossible, but any communication miraculous. The inaccessibility of an author's intention does not make an absolute gulf between reader and writer, but an opportunity for unusual and compelling communion. And the ease with which critics can dissipate literary meanings by reference to political or cultural conditions may simply be sophisticated dodges from the spirit of a text.
This is the case with a critic Monson describes who, in reading a short story by Catholic author Andre Dubus, looks so narrowly at gender issues that the protagonist's experiences of crisis and grace are lost to her. Just as the protagonist in Dubus's story must learn to submit to God's grace, so must we readers, according to Monson, be willing to surrender ourselves and our convenient interpretive lenses to the mystery and manners of an author's work. It is only on the basis of such trust that language and literature become mediating and not maddening.
"As I read fiction and teach it," Monson concludes, " I will seek to maintain a certain faith, not only in the precarious reliability of words, but in the notion that authors use words with purpose that readers may, by a combination of wit and grace, divine."
[Full text of the article avaliable at First Things.]