In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

xv An Introduction to Girardian Reading A ll of the essays that follow this introduction were delivered as papers or written directly for publication in relation to the work of René Girard. Many were conceived in connection with annual meetings of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion. Others were delivered at joint meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature, and elsewhere. Still others were written for the Bulletin of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion or its journal, Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. Others again were written for the Journal of Religion and Literature and the Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry or for edited collections of essays published in book form. Eighteen of the following twenty-five essays and short pieces are mine. Among those eighteen,twelvehavebeenpublishedbefore;sixappearhereforthefirsttime. The eighteen texts that comprise the heart of the following volume constitute the bulk of my writings to date on René Girard outside of the three books that I have published individually or in conjunction with others, and a long essay on the relation of Girard to Levinas, Buber, and Rosenzweig I delivered at the French Embassy in Rome.1 I have included, in addition, seven very short texts (some little more than a paragraph) by others: one account of a discussion in which I participated (following a paper delivery in xvi Introduction Cerisy-la-Salle), one response by Girard to an essay I wrote on Second Isaiah (included below), three replies to texts I had written or presentations I had made (also included below) by Raymund Schwager and Józef Niewiadomski, and two accounts of a session held at the American Academy of Religion in which I described the larger contours of prophetic reading with Charles Mabee and Hans Jensen.2 Why gather them here? René Girard is a prophetic thinker. He teaches us to read the European novel, ancient Greek tragedy, or, concomitantly, Jewish and Christian scripture, not by offering us a method he has developed, but by offering us the method they have developed, the interpretative reading method already available within each of these bodies of writing. Or, to put it another way, he teaches us literary reading. Although nominally he turned away from literary reading after the conclusion of his first book to pursue more anthropological concerns and then religious studies concerns—the origins of imitative desire, or the sacrificial violence to which it leads (the management of which remains, in his view, the hallmark of archaic societies and whose exposure remains the hallmark of ours), or its exposure in holy scripture—it is an underlying assumption of these many and diverse essays that in some ways he never abandoned his original project, that the sacrificial and its relation to violence, its origins in mimetic desire, its exposition in Biblical writing, remain the subject matter of literary reading. To read literature is to read the way literature reads. This is an astounding idea once its implications are teased out. I grew up in the United States in the 1950s when new criticism was in its heyday. The close reading of literature, l’explication de texte, as it was then called, was all the rage. The method held immense promise because it was felt to be not a method at all but an access to what literature itself was already doing. Northrop Frye took the project “to the next level,” as they say in academia (in a phrase probably borrowed from signs to be found in university parking garages), opening doors to mythic and ritual dimensions without encumbering those discussions with the postulates of Freudian psychoanalysis or Jungian archetypalism. French thinking, in the hands of practitioners like Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, amplified our conception of literary thinking by loosening the hitherto strict boundaries between doing and saying. And in this country, Paul de Man, Stanley Fish, Harold Bloom, and Geoffrey Hartman, among others, Introduction xvii welcomed this new thinking—which was really a return to old thinking, since it recalled (even as it dismantled), on the one hand, the ancient Roman distinction regarding the liberal arts, the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and on the other, the ancient “quarrel” between poetic making and philosophy. But no one, prior to Girard, and in another realm Emmanuel Levinas, it could be argued, challenged quite as profoundly the Platonic formulation of representation—that something stands for something for...

Share