religion and literature, unit 1 ppt by jonathan swift

this a ppt about religion and literature. it covers units such as jonathan smith's essay Religion, REligions, Religious etc.

1. Religion and Literature
Unit I
Lecture 1

2. Mircea Eliade:
•The origin of some types of epic is traceable to the practice of
shamanism.
•One of the most important and conspicuous features of
literature's relation to religion is thus that of affirmation, in
the sense that literature—both oral and written—functions to
preserve and transmit religious ideas and actions.

3. •Sibylline prophecy in the Roman poet Virgil's Aeneid
•Haruspicy (foretelling the future) in the Roman dramatist Seneca's
Oedipus

4. The Literatures of India: An Introduction-Edward Dimock et al
“…until relatively modern times in India—meaning by India the Indo-
Pakistan subcontinent—it is sometimes difficult to distinguish
literature from religious documentation. This is not because there
has been an imposition of a system of religious values on the society;
it is rather because religion in India is so interwoven with every facet
of life, including many forms of literature, that it becomes
indistinguishable".

5. T. S. Eliot's "Religion and Literature" (1935)

6. •The application of our religion [its beliefs and practices] to the
criticism of any literature
•Eliot applies religion to literature defined as "works of imagination"
in three ways
•When we describe a text as "religious literature" we mean it comes
from the pen of those women and men blessed with "a gift of
language which makes them delightful to read to all those who can
enjoy language well written, even if they are unconcerned with the
objects which the writers had in view“
•“Religious literature" often manifests itself as "religious" or
"devotional" poetry And this kind of poetry is "minor poetry“.

7. Religion, Religions, Religious-Jonathan Z. Smith

8. •Religion is not a native category.
•It is not a first-person term of self-characterization.
•It is a category imposed from the outside on some
aspect of native culture

9. NinianSmart's Seven Dimensions of Worldviews(secular
or religious)
1. Myth
2. Ritual
3. Doctrine
4. Ethics
5. Social dimension
6. Experientialdimension
7. Artisticdimension

10. Robert Cummings Neville, in Foreword to Rodney L. Taylor, The
Religious Dimensionsof Confucianism):
•Mythic,philosophical, or theological
•Ritual.
•A tradition have some conception and practicalprocedures.

11. “The most common form of classifying religions found
both in native categories and in scholarly literature, is
dualistic and can be reduced, regardless of what
differentiumis employed, to ‘theirs’ and ‘ours’ …a “world
religion” is simply a religion like ours, and that it is, above
all, a tradition that has achieved sufficient power and
number to enter our history to form it, interact with it, or
thwart it”

12. •If religion is a second order category for organizing
difference, and if these taxonomies have changed
over time from the fifteenth century to today, then
the definition of “religion” is up for constant
refabrication.

13. •Dutch historian of religion C. P. Tiele(1830-1902).
•Smith quotes from Tiele'sentry on "Religions" in the glorious ninth
edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
•Tieleclassifies religions into "natural" (theirs) and "ethical" (ours).
•Ethical religions are subdivided into "national" religions and
"universal," or "world," religions.

14. “…while there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human
experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture
or another, by one criterion or another, as religious-there is no data for
religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar's study.... Religion
has no independent existence apart from the academy"