Sober Cannibals, Drunken Christians: Melville, Kierkegaard, and Tragic Optimism in Polarized Works

by LORENTZEN JAMIE

• ISBN13: 9780881462005
• ISBN10: 0881462004
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-10-30
• Publisher: Mercer Univ Pr

Summary

Despite that they didn't know each other, the writing styles of American writer Herman Melville (1819-1891) and Danish writer Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) complement each other, especially their humor, irony, penchants for paradox, and passions for imagery and poetics. In addition, their works similarly address issues of the world and time. Esthetic, ethical, social, philosophical, and theological paths on which they walk reveal similar footprints. World historical circumstances to which they were responding in their time and to which they continue to respond in our time are not dissimilar.Melville's and Kierkegaard's rebounding echoes reverberate in our highly charged and polarized times, speaking especially to the timeless conundrum of what Kierkegaard calls the disastrous confounding of politics and religion and what Melville calls drunken Christianity-namely, the intoxicated mixing of worldly issues with otherworldly issues without care paid to maintaining necessary ethical distinctions.These two writers are like two prophets crying from New York and Copenhagen street corners about our own cultural wildernesses. They are truth-tellers and authors who ought to be read and studied because they have something urgent to say about our shifty human condition and our polarized world

Author Biography

Jamie Lorentzen chairs the Friends of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota. He is the author of Kierkegaard's Metaphors and is editor of Toward the Final Crossroads: A Festschrift for Edna Howard Hong.

Table of Contents

Chronology	p. 7
Foreword	p. 10
The Key To It All	p. 17
Two Whales: Histories	p. 50
Two Whales: Writing Styles	p. 108
Two Whales: Philosophies	p. 133
Two Whales: Faiths	p. 175
Drunken Christians	p. 201
Models of Sobriety	p. 250
Nature and God	p. 298
Acknowledgments	p. 304
Abbreviations and Documentation	p. 305
Works Cited	p. 307
Index	p. 312
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