Approaches to Voegelinian Literary Analysis

a book review by Lee Trepanier

 

Charles R. Embry, ed. Voegelinian Readings of Modern Literature. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011. 290 pp. incl. index. Cloth $60.00.

 

Eric Voegelin's Approach to Criticism

 

The work of Eric Voegelin encompasses not only the disciplines of history, theology, philosophy, and political science, but also literature, as evident in the publication of his letter to Robert B. Heilman, “On Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw,” in the 1971 issue of Southern Review.

 

Voegelin himself believed that, as a philosopher, he needed to be open to the insights of all individuals engaged in the search for truth, which included poets, dramatists, and novelists. Furthermore, Voegelin’s preoccupation with language and its relationships to human experience and symbolization, would lead him to look at literature to gain a better understanding of language itself.

 

 

 

For Voegelin, literature provided an imaginative and fictive account that enables us to understand the common humanity and spiritual order to which we all belong.

 

Voegelinian Readings of Modern Literature is an application of Voegelin’s principles of literary criticism to a variety of literary texts.

 

The introduction speaks of the two foundational experiences in Voegelin’s philosophical project–the experience of disorder and the experience of wonder and awe–and how the works of literature selected comports with these two experiences.

 

Charles R. Embry, the book's editor, encourages the adoption of Voegelin’s philosophy in the interpretation of literature. In his previous book, The Philosopher and the Storyteller, Embry outlined some principles of literary criticism that Voegelin himself employed:

1) the critic must first give precedence to the text itself;

2) the critic must assume that the author knew what he was doing and that the parts of the text work together as a single entity;

3) the critic must rely upon an interpretative terminology that is consistent with the language symbols of the source; and

4) the critic must develop a system of interpretation that is an analytical, rational continuation of the author’s work from compactness to differentiation.¹

 

In short, Voegelin asked the critic to respect the text and its author and  show scholarly humility rather than insinuate personal tastes. Like philosophy, literature offers its own set of symbols and the experiences behind them, and the critic tries to understand them in his search for truth and order.