num_pages: 136
description: In this book, Ruf tries to understand how the concepts of "voice" and "genre" function in texts, especially religious texts. To this end, he joins literary theorists in the discussion about "narrative." Ruf rejects the idea of genre as a fixed historical form that serves as a template for readers and writers; instead, he suggests that we imagine different genres, whether narrative, lyric, or dramatic, as the expression of different voices. Each voice, he asserts, possesses different key embodiment, sociality, contextuality, and opacity in the dramatic voice; intimacy, limitation, urgency in lyric; and a "magisterial" quality of comprehensiveness and cohesiveness in narrative. These voices are models for our selves, composing an unruly and unstable multiplicity of selves. Ruf applies his theory of "voice" and "genre" to five Dineson's Out of Africa , Donne's Holy Sonnets , Primo Levi's The Periodic Table , Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach , andColeridge's Biographia Literaria . Through these literary works, he discerns the detailed ways in which a text constructs a voice and, in the process, a self. More importantly, Ruf demonstrates that this process is a religious one, fulfilling the function that religions traditionally that of defining the self and its world.
language: English
title: Entangled Voices: Genre and the Religious Construction of the Self
titlecomplete: Entangled Voices: Genre and the Religious Construction of the Self
ratings_count: 3
publisher: Oxford University Press