Abstract
Character is a traditional word for a person’s consistency, integrity, and fidelity to their deepest commitments. Conscience monitors and safeguards the consistency of character, warning of inconsistencies between a person’s established priorities and his actions, detecting failures to integrate belief and conduct.
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Sallie McFague, Speaking in Parables (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975);
Michael Novak, Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove (New York: Harper and Row, 1971);
James W. McClendon, Biography as Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1974);
Janet Varner Gunn, Autobiography: Towards a Poetics of Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982);
John S. Dunne, A Search for God in Time and Memory (New York: Macmillan and Company, 1967);
Stanley Hauerwas, with David Burrell, ‘Self-Deception and Autobiography: Reflections on Speer’s Inside the Third Reich’, in Hauerwas’s Truthfulness and Tragedy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977);
George Stroup, The Promise of Narrative Theology: Recovering the Gospel in the Church (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1981);
Michael Goldberg, Theology and Narrative: A Critical Introduction (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1982).
Stephen Crites, ‘The Narrative Quality of Experience’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 39 (1971) 291–311.
See, for instance, Jerome H. Buckley, The Turning Key: Autobiography and the Subjective Impulse Since 1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).
Similarly, James M. Cox, in Recovering Literature’s Lost Ground: Essays in American Autobiography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989) p. 34, expresses dismay about ‘the ease with which literary critics assure themselves that “mere” fact has little to do with the art of autobiography’. This assumption, Cox asserts, has led to a contraction of the definition of literature, so that great memoirs such as those by Jefferson and Grant are neglected.
James Olney, ‘Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical, and Bibliographical Introduction’, in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980) p. 21.
Christine Downing, ‘Revisioning Autobiography: The Bequest of Freud and Jung’, Soundings 60 (1977) 210–228.
An exception to the general lack of attention to characterization in religious studies is James Laney, ‘Characterization and Moral Judgments’, The Journal of Religion 55 (1975) 405–14, which explains the significance of the activity of characterization in moral judgment, although Laney does not discuss autobiography.
Wesley Kort’s Moral Fiber: Character and Belief in Recent American Fiction (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982) investigates some ways in which fictional characters are shaped by novelists’ cultural and religious beliefs about human nature. Although there are significant analogies between character assessment in fiction and in autobiography, an author’s assessment and characterization of his own character raise the distinctive questions addressed in this chapter.
Paul Ricoeur, ‘Narrative Time’, Critical Inquiry 7 (1980) 178.
Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979) p. 77: ‘Character does generate narrative, just as narrative generates character. The primitive “ado” must, insofar as it is a series of actions, have agents, and these agents, insofar as ado or fable acquires extension, must transcend their original type and function, must cease to be merely Hero, Opponent, and so on, and acquire idiosyncracies, have proper names. The more elaborate the story grows — the more remote from its schematic base — the more these agents will deviate from type and come to look like “characters.” The immediate motive may be realism or something else; whatever it is, the text of the story is spangled with signs that may be read as part of the evidence from which we habitually construct character.’
Elizabeth Bruss, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) p. 10: ‘There is no intrinsically autobiographical form. But there are limited generalizations to be made about the dimensions of action which are common to these autobiographies, and which seem to form the core of our notion of the functions an autobiographical text must perform.’
Quotations in parentheses refer to Malcolm X, with Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine Books, 1965).
Robertson Davies, Fifth Business (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1970); The Manticore (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1972); and World of Wonders (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1975).
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© 1992 John D. Barbour
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Barbour, J.D. (1992). Character and Characterization. In: The Conscience of the Autobiographer. Studies in Literature and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371088_3
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