An Interview with Wendy Steiner Wendy Steiner received her B.A. from McGill University and both her M.Phil. After holding assistant professorships at Yale and the University of Michigan, she joined the Penn faculty in 1979. She is currently the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English and, since 1995, Chair of the English Department. Dr. Steiner's fields are modern and postmodern literature but much of her research has involved the visual arts as well.
Fundamentalism is a literalist view of things.
It pops up in religion and politics and other areas where ideology is important. Fundamentalists go back to the word, the document that started it all, whether that's a Bible or a Constitution, and base their actions on a literal reading of that text. The problem for me comes when they apply this thinking to literature - or to other arts such as painting and photography. Treating a work of art as if it were a literal statement with one and only one meaning meant to evoke a specific action in the audience is, I think, a serious error. Art doesn't work that way.